Fotograf Julian Birbrajer i Stockholm, The Radetzky March / Radetzkymarschen - Sök Fotograf

Om mig

My life long obsession is to explore language and time by means of photography. Often I find myself creating new work exploiting the specific context of a newly discovered place through my wide-angle lens. The sources of inspiration are generally words and concepts, and often, in a physical sense, more often than not, flea markets and cemeteries.

I have chosen, mostly in order to create a general label for my work, the term "Photolinguistics". I am ordinarily not fond of genre classification, but it is an endevour to create an artistic identity, with image and language being its main elements. When I was studying linguistics at the university, I discovered Ferdinand de Saussure and his thoughts on the arbitrary relationship between "le signifiant" (the sound, the word, the sign, the form) and "le signifié" (the concept/object, the meaning, the content), i.e. that there is no given connection between them, that it is a question of convention. This has characterized my work since then, and in my photography I often allude to that. René Magritte’s "Ceci n’est pas une pipe" have always fascinated me, because of the questions that arise on linguistic and figurative representation.

At the same time I am interested in different aspects of identity and also in the interaction between, on the one hand, the sacred, and on the other hand, the profane—it delights me to disarm the former and to exalt the latter. In general I am quite fond of humour and seriousness. My images begin sometimes with a thought or a word, but just as often they can be triggered by an object, a thing. Some can be depictions of the outside world, rarely manipulated, other constructed in a studio. My domestic gods are Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger. The art movements and isms that inspire me mostly are conceptualism, dada and Fluxus.