24
B+W
COMMENT
An ancestral property is the inspiration behind Paul Thulin’s powerful
collection of photographs which are now available in a new book.
He talks to Susan Burnstine about pictures, family and memory.
AMERICAN CONNECTIONPaul Thulin’s stunning
monograph Pine Tree
Ballads (Candela
Books, Spring 2019)
is a deeply personal,
multi-layered
impression of family, land and
time inspired by his ancestral
property in Gray’s Point, Maine,
where his family has lived during
the summer for a century.
Nearly 100 years ago Thulin’s
great-grandfather moved
his family from Sweden to
Boston. Maine soon became
their favourite retreat since
the geography resembled their
homeland in many ways. After
locating a plot of land and an
old orchard in Deer Isle, Maine,
the family visited regularly
until his grandfather acquired
the property during the 1940s.
This ancestral land later becamea rich canvas for Thulin’s Pine
Tree Ballads.
The photographs included in
the book convey a deep feeling
of history and mythology while
being rooted in fantasy, folklore,
mystery and magic. ‘My family
has always shared stories and
history about the land,’ he says.
‘When I was little, often at
night by the light of oil lamps,
the family would gather around
50 years’ worth of handmade
family photo albums. When
you sit with a family photo
album, you anticipate an active
dialogue of collective story
invention to be shared amongst
generations. As a kid, I would
obsessively look them over andmemorise each album to a point
that they became an inherited
and unquestioned narrative
regarding the people, landmarks
and events that took place
before I was born.’
When creating this series,
Thulin adopted what he refers
to as an ‘aura aesthetic’, which
‘celebrates the formal beauty
and conceptual profundity of
analogue-based photographic
disruptions, such as light
leaks, dust, scratches, lens
distortion and chemical
stains,’ he says. ‘The images are
being represented as objects
created, looked at, transported,
stored and destroyed while
at the same time holdingthe narrative and cultural
significance of the relationship
of the subject of the image to
these analogue disruptions.
The idea that the material
sense of aura in Pine Tree
Ballads symbolically reveals
the momentary surfacing
of hidden and potentially
confusing emotions, relations
and forces of my family’s
history as well as the history of
the land itself is insightful and
was something I considered
when making this work. The
flaws and disruptions create an
atmosphere of materiality and
add a disruptive state of psyche
to the narrative content.’D
uring the editing
process Thulin
decided the narrative
structure shouldsusanburnstine.comAura of Boreas. Hel, Daughter of Loki.‘My family has always shared stories
and history about the land.’