TALKING PICTURES Boe Marion

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Boe Marion is a photographer and artist from Oslo, Norway. His passion for image-making began at a young age, and he has since honed his craft and gone on to produce an impressive body of work, spanning the fields of fashion, art and commercial work. His clients include Vogue, H&M, Arket, Lampoon Magazine, Michael Kors, Submission Beauty, Autre Magazine, Free People and L’Officiel, among others.

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Etta and Giant European Hornet, 2021

 

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I hadn't shot an image that I loved after becoming a dad summer 2021—stunned by the fear, happiness and a very real sense of responsibility.

I think I actually grew up in that moment my daughter, Etta, was born. That stunted my creativity, and later, evolved it. At any rate, it felt foreign at first.

One day I stood in our barn, and I found this perfectly preserved European Giant Hornet, stuck to the screen window in the hay-door. I saved it for later in my bug mason jar I keep.

In the early fall I wanted to shoot an image of Etta. I brought her to the barn together with my wife, Olivia, and I remember, she was asleep and had just been fed, so I put her on a piece of torn canvas in nothing but her diaper. We put the hornet as gently as we could on her head. She kept sleeping so I took one image and thus, the shutter woke her up suddenly to a large toothless scream. I took another shot. With two frames, I had made something new, balanced in love and fear—it illustrates the feelings I had moving into fatherhood and the image stirs emotions in people beyond what I feel.

The lesson for me was that big changes in life can create a new kind of creativity.

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Ngaatar Sherpa smoking a hookah - Namche Bazaar, Nepal 2022

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This is an image I took on my first trip to Nepal. There to work on my ongoing book project about the porters that work in the valleys, I want to show their tireless work with tourists, climbers and commerce in the deep valleys of Nepal, as well as focus on the environmental impact the increasing tourism poses on the ecology of the sensitive areas in the Himalayas.

I remember starting my work and being so immersed in my predisposed ideas of what kind of images I was hoping to make, that the first week there I was almost baffled by how easy everything was going, expecting and feeling nothing but clear success. When I got home and started going through the 160 rolls of scanned film I realised that my friend and partner in the project, Manuel, was right all along; he had voiced early on that the images I made while letting go of my pre-made ideas, would in the end be the strongest ones. And the lesson became that to catch a deeper, truer image, you are required to let go, move in closer and to step over thresholds. Like with this image of our translator and Sherpa guide Ngaatar in a Bhatti (a tea-House predominantly used by porters and locals).

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Man with Horse - Pheriche, Nepal, 2022 

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When I spotted this horseman at a pass coming down from Everest Base Camp I was also coming down with the infamous “Khumbu cough” the umbrella term for the viral infections that is flourishing during the tourist season in the Khumbu valley. We were also coming down way too fast, as I had to rush home for another assignment. So we were doing double days towards Kathmandu. I unfortunately had to put my camera away for many of the passages, and battling the dizzying altitude, sickness and speed, I did not think I had any chance to catch a shot. But then we came upon this man moving even faster leading his horse down the steep slope and I woke up from the haze of excuses, so I was trying to find the perfect moment while also getting my RB67 camera out of the pack, reloading and almost running while battling with the waist-level viewfinder.

In the end I feel like I was lucky to catch the swoop of the ice river coming from Taboche Peak in the background, here aimed perfectly at the porter connecting him to the landscape, and showing the way he flowed down the pass like water or air in this true Prana state.

The lesson I wanted to share here is to continue moving and never stop shooting even if it feels impossible.

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Den første Snøen ( The First Snow ) - Grøtfjord, Norway, 2005 

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This image is special cause it has so much of my childhood in it. Not because I am from this village in northern Norway, and not because of the boy on the bike juxtaposed to the early winter weather, but because of the feeling of loneliness the moment of the first snow induces in me. It carries the idea of months of darkness. I remember, as I child, I always had the same feelings around December; lazy hibernation, flame candles, Santas, angels and the smell of pinewood smoke from chimneys while walking home from school in the waning light. Then, near Christmas, no light at all. Now I find happiness in the darkness and cold — it’s time to relax, a reminder to be outside while the sun is up and spend time at home with people you hold close, to retain the fire and heat of the sun in darker months.

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Floating by - North Carolina, 2020

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We had travelled far for this one. I had just watched the film, 'Down by Law' directed by Jim Jarmusch and was excited to be inspired by it shooting in the wet and swampy south east.

But we had all of the odds against us: a heavy rainstorm in the Blue Mountains, a pandemic lockdown, a broken transmission and a difficult storyboard all created an air that smelled like failure from the very moment I drove down from Brooklyn. But to my surprise the true failure came later, and it was no one’s fault but mine. In my haze of creative freedom, I had forgotten that the subject matter cannot always be forced into a narrative.

For to them it can be completely foreign, almost undressing them from their identity.

This shot presents that wake up call for me,  a lesson in always permitting the subject to have their say. If not you might end up with un-relatable fiction. I do wish they told me that in college.

Although this image remains; as a reminder and illustration of your creative reflection becoming someone else’s.

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Kick! Lexie Smith - Oregon, 2019

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Some of the best images are made at the very last moment. This one came at the end of two long days shooting at the beaches in northern Oregon. Tired and sort of feeling done with the shoot, I had Lexie run on the beach one more time. She made this kick movement out of the blue and created a triangle shape that broke the line of the bluff in the background and I was lucky to be there for it. Her look of weightlessness still perplexes me. And even if the darkness can take a big chunk of my work, I think this image shows the playfulness that I like to show sometimes. On this trip many of my very dear friends were working together and there are only good memories to be had from it, and this is an image I think about on the regular that brings back those memories.

The lesson here is that there have to be light moments to balance out the darkness.

 

Follow Boe @boe_marion

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