Fotografi’s portfolio prize
Photo: Alexander Nerleir Søtorp
Five selected projects from Fotografi's Portfolio Prize are presented at DOK25!
Fotografi's Portfolio Prize is an open competition that promotes new Nordic photography. Each year, a professional jury selects the best projects of the year and announces the winner of the Portfolio Prize. This year's winner is Alexander Nerleir Søtorp with the project «Gehenna».
Alexander Nerleir Søtorp
Bio
Alexander Nerleir Søtorp is a photographer graduated from Norsk fotofagskole. He works at the intersection of art and documentary. With an observational approach, he rarely directs his subjects. With camera in hand, he explores his local environment, the world, and his inner landscape.
Gehenna
"The river runs black and the air is thick like soup"
On February 1, 2023, I traveled to Ghana for a residency at CeST (Center for Sustainable Transformation). The images from the residency are a conversation between me and Ghana, a conversation about joy and sorrow, love and fear, oppression and survival, hope and despair. Through photography, I explore the meeting between personal experiences and global structures.
In this project, I draw a historical parallel to Gehenna – a valley outside Jerusalem that once served as the city's landfill. Here, waste and carcasses were thrown and burned, making the place a symbol of destruction and pollution. In the Bible, Gehenna is described as an eternally burning sea of fire, an image of hell on earth. Through this connection, I want to point out how the global South, and Ghana specifically, is used as a dumping ground for the consumer society. I want to point out how the suffering in Ghana is partly a product of the prosperity in the global North. In 2019, Brennpunkt made a documentary that shed light on how large quantities of electronic waste from Norway end up in Agbogbloshie, an area in Ghana's capital that is referred to as the world's most toxic place. Swedish journalists have traced clothes from Norway to Accra. 100 tons of clothes leave Kantomanto, West Africa's largest used market, every day as trash. The city's waste management infrastructure can handle around 30% of it. The rest is dumped in the river or in illegal dumps.
At the intersection of art and documentary, I seek to create images that not only document a reality but also challenge the gaze and question the global structures behind this disparity.
Janne Amalie Svit
Bio
Janne Amalie Svit (1978) is a Norwegian photographer educated at Kent Institute of Art and Design in England and Norsk Fotofagskole. She teaches photography at Sund Folkehøgskole in addition to working on her own projects.
Svit's work is closely linked to her relationship with her surroundings in the north, a place many would consider the middle of nowhere. Her photographs can be seen as a visual diary, where she explores belonging, motherhood, and the human condition. She works with both staged and observed photography.
Svit is currently participating in the Masterclass course at Norsk Fotofagskole and is working towards the release of her photo book Bivring in June 2025.
Bivring
Bivring explores the thin line between order and chaos – a visual diary about the feeling of the familiar becoming strange, both on an internal and external level.
Growing up in a place you want to escape from leaves its mark. I grew up in such a place, and as a result, I developed a strong inner life, where imagination and observation took up a lot of space. As a 20-year-old, I left this place, but now I live there again.
I want to tell stories that both seduce and disturb – that balance between the unpleasant and the beautiful. It's about the experience of the world, about how something familiar can contain an underlying unease. My images are more than documentation of the visible; they open up to the hidden and the strange. It is in the encounter between the familiar and the disturbing that the unpleasant arises – when the safe no longer feels safe, but has an echo of something unsettling.
In the encounter with the unpleasant, something fundamental about being human is reflected – a glimpse of something fundamental to our existence. The air between you and me is filled with the unsaid, yet understood. In this space, the connection between the conscious and the hidden arises, between the concrete and what we only sense – a realization that life is rarely either-or, but interwoven and tangled. This is the foundation of Bivring. My works combine staged and observational photography. I blend the inner world with the outer to tell more complex stories. Bivring explores the tensions of everyday life on a personal level, while a greater unrest characterizes the atmosphere – between people, objects, and nature. Climate crises and geopolitical unrest form the backdrop for the project, where the world's uncertainty mirrors the inner unrest we all carry with us.
Bivring: A Nynorsk and dialect word meaning tremor or shaking. In Bokmål, bevring is used, and synonyms for the word are unease, eerie, and mental agitation.
Johanne Nyborg
Bio
Johanne Nyborg (1994) is a photographer and visual artist born and raised in a small village in Sogn og Fjordane, Norway. She has studied at Westerdals and Bilder Nordic and is currently based in Oslo. Her first photobook, Geitmyra, was published by Pseudonym Publishing in 2022.
Johanne works on long-term, personal projects at the intersection of documentary and art, with analog photography as her primary medium. She works tactilely and hands-on with her pieces, both in the darkroom and by making her own frames.
Her projects explore themes around the human relationship to nature and other species, environmental protection and biodiversity, as well as identity and belonging. Through her work, she aims to bring people closer to nature, the seasons, and the cycles we are all a part of.
A Hundred Years of Sunshine and Storm, Fixed in Physical Form
“A Hundred Years of Sunshine and Storm, Fixed in Physical Form” began as a photographic exploration of the remnants of Norway’s ancient, primeval forests.
In recent years, we’ve gained insight into the vast destruction of Norwegian nature: NRK’s investigative series shows before-and-after photos of lush forests, wetlands, and wildlife areas being leveled to make way for roads, wind turbines, business, and industry. It also reveals that none of the 44,000 documented encroachments are part of any overarching national plan. In other words, no one has a complete overview of—or takes responsibility for—the massive degradation of nature in our country.
Climate change and the loss of biodiversity are among the greatest challenges of our time, and the ancient, biologically rich forests can help stabilize the climate, store carbon, and protect us from extreme weather. In Norway, only 1.7% of our forests remain untouched by humans. These are the forests where half of Norway’s nearly 3,000 red-listed species live.
I entered this project with the intention of spreading awareness, closeness, and love for our shared basis of life. I wanted to show the forest as a place where people can reconnect with themselves, find peace and presence, and see value beyond land use and resource extraction. I wanted to elevate and protect the forest through photography.
Yet, over the course of the project, a smoldering feeling began to emerge: Who am I to depict the forest? Who am I to choose fragments of a whole and present them as truth? To remove pieces of the forest from its habitat and place them in gallery spaces or printed between covers? In my attempt to approach the anthropocene-free pockets of the forest, I’ve instead been confronted with my own ingrained human-centered worldview. A mechanical worldview that seeks to “use” nature for its own gain—as if the intrinsic value of the forest only exists on our terms.
The truth is that we will never be able to grasp the full scope and importance of what happens among crumbling pine logs and beneath the bark of silver-gray snags. We can get closer, we can examine with magnifying glasses, we can draw parallels that make intellectual sense, but the life experience held by 500-year-old trees will always be out of our reach.
Through this project, I navigate the paradoxical emotions in this encounter: the desire to protect and preserve, the urge to illuminate, reveal, and share through my lens on the forest—while at the same time acknowledging that the forest will never exist for us, for me, for the viewer. The forest exists for itself.
Julie Hrnčířová
Bio
Julie Hrnčířová (b. 1992) is a Czech artist currently based in Oslo. She holds a degree from Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles, France. Hrnčířová has exhibited her work at several venues, including the festival Les Rencontres de la Photographies in Arles, the Spring Exhibition at Fotogalleriet in Oslo, and group exhibitions at KÖSK gallery and Fotografihuset.
In 2022, she had a solo exhibition titled Urban Poetism at Fotografiens Hus in Oslo and
was also featured in the Nordic Light Festival in Kristiansund, Norway. In January 2023, she had a solo show This Might Be Useful One Day in the gallery Atelier Josefa Sudka in Prague. In November 2023, the artist exhibited her series Everyday Sculptures within PhotoSaint Germain in Paris, curated by Raphaëlle Stopin, Director of the Rouen Normandy Photographic Center. In 2024, she was part of the exhibition Iso 36 in the gallery Page Five in Prague. Hrnčířová ́s artistic practice revolves around public space, urban environments, chance encounters, still lifes, and discarded objects. She often works with installations and sculptures that incorporate wood, metal, fabrics, and ceramics, exploring the interplay between different media.
Hrnčířová is a part of 'Futures Photography,' a Europe-based photography platform that brings together the global photography community of emerging artists worldwide. She is also associated with 'Forbundet Frie Fotografer,' the national organization in Norway that promotes photographic art.
https://www.juliehrncirova.com/
https://www.instagram.com/julie_hrncirova/
Fragments of the Cities
Fragments of the Cities builds on my previous work where I explore the transformation and urbanism of European cities, focusing on photographing details of buildings, found and thrown objects, and discarded elements from construction sites in the cities. I examine the impact and consequences of the pervasive globalisation that drives our society and the negative effects of development projects in the cities. The project critiques a society that discards as quickly as it consumes, ignoring the ecological impact left behind. These issues are prevalent in Oslo as well as in other European cities - they face significant development projects and largely privatised areas where the primary goal is profit rather than affordable and healthy living conditions for residents.
As Colin McFarlane notes in his book Fragments of the City:
“Cities are becoming increasingly fragmented materially, socially, and spatially. From broken toilets and everyday things to art and forms of writing, fragments are signatures of urban worlds and provocations for change.”
This project consists of handmade colour photograms and light paintings - luminograms - made in a darkroom, collecting and capturing various objects found on the streets, mainly collected over several months in Oslo, particularly around the neighbourhood Bjorvika, Grønland and the city centre, as well as more remote, industrial areas with an undergoing construction and development. The photograms abstractly and poetically comment on the traces left behind by urban development and they seek to reflect on the transformation of cities, the growth of unsustainable projects, the waste and neglect of recycling materials, and critique the globalisation of urban spaces.
Nikko Knösch
Bio
I’m a Swedish photographer, punk drummer, retoucher and printer from Stockholm, Sweden.
I’m 33 years old and during the days I work with photographers doing their image editing, scanning and printing. From 2014 to 2016 I studied digital image editing at the Stockholm School of Photography and have been working for photographers since then. Mainly commercial work at first but over these last 4-5 years I’ve been working almost only with artistic photography and helping Stockholm based photographers such as Anders Petersen, Monika Macdonald and Cato Lein producing prints for exhibitions and doing image editing for both books and print.
In 2019 I started doing my own photography, mainly focusing on finding my own voice and language in images. Since then I have been a part of a few group exhibitions in places like Arbetets Museum and K*mopa. In 2024 I was awarded 2nd prize in Gommas black and white awards and was also nominated as finalist for the Gomma grant in the black and white category. I’m also one of GUP magazine's Fresh eyes talents for 2025 and will be published in a couple of collective books and zines over the year to come.
I am currently working on 2 projects which I want to publish as books in the end and the plan is working less for others and more with my own photography.
Folkungagatan
I partly grew up on Folkungagatan, without ever living there. It was the place to go for the first legal beers, where the friends hung out. Where I could go and meet friends without making an appointment first. Folkungagatan is almost a highway and almost a bar street. Almost ugly and almost beautiful at the same time. Dense traffic colliding with youthful spirit searching along the street for something more. I feel almost at home.
Folkungagatan is a photographic exploration of a street in Stockholm, where the complex relationship between space and human presence comes into focus. This series captures the raw, contrasting textures of the street. Harsh, unrelenting traffic and the rough urban landscape against the warmth and quiet resilience of its inhabitants.
The photographs are in black and white with stark, energetic blacks to heighten a sense of disorientation, as if you are both inside and outside at once. Both included and excluded simultaneously. This tension reflects my own personal experience of being present and withdrawn at the same time. Outgoingly shy, caught between wanting to connect and observing from a distance.
Through the images, I aim to convey the paradox of loneliness in a crowded space. Despite the street's cold exterior, its people embody a quiet, shared humanity, offering a glimpse of their inner worlds, dreams, hopes, and the warmth they carry despite the city’s indifferent facade. This contrast is the heart of Folkungagatan: the ugly beauty of the street and the delicate, intimate stories of those who inhabit it.
My plan is to work at least one more year with this, trying to visit more people in their homes along the street to include both the permanent inhabitants and those who only inhabit it at night.
