Hurricane Season by Hannah Modigh

Description

“The suite has been photographed in southern Louisiana in the United States. There, the threat of hurricanes arrives annually, but the storm around the people is felt daily. The storms behind the doors, inside people. Be prepared for the outbreak, the recovery, and the constant need to start over. Memories that never have time to heal but are repressed – as far as it goes. In a macho landscape it is more acceptable to be angry than scared.

 I was interested in Louisiana for the first time because of its violent side. New Orleans is one of the most violent cities in the United States. Louisiana is also the state with the most prisoners per capita.  Poverty, violence is directly related to the hurricanes, but also much based on a long period of segregation, where racist views are inherited.

 Hurricane Season is a metaphor for an atmosphere of living on the verge of eruption and a sense that something is still lurking in the calm. Hurricane Season is not about hurricanes, not about South Louisiana and not about poverty. It is about me, and about you. A mental state. We can call it a sense of being between disasters. Something scary happened, and it will likely happen again. It’s quiet now, but beneath the surface lurks uncertainty, fear and anger.

 During my time in Louisiana I realised that fears of hurricanes and the undertone of aggression by large parts of society come from the same source. Fear and anxiety are natural reactions to feelings of threat, but they are passivity and unproductive. In a context where the weakness is undesirable, even dangerous, there is a gain in transforming fear into action and anger.”

Hurricane Season
Hardcover
Publisher: Max Ström, 2016
Pages:112
ISBN:9789171263728

Hannah Modigh website: http://hannahmodigh.se/

Gallery of Photography Ireland: https://www.galleryofphotography.ie/

Hannah Modigh’s exhibition Delta at the Gallery of Photography

Presenting an extensive series of small-format and intimate photographs, Delta is Hannah Modigh’s first solo show in Ireland. This is the second exhibition in our Contemporary Women’s Practice season, celebrating leading women photographers at work today. Although perhaps best known for immersing herself in unfamiliar situations, with this series she has turned instead to her immediate surroundings, in a search for traces representing the presence of an absence. The result is a series of emotionally charged photographic encounters, looking to Modigh’s own experiences, her family, and the everyday. Delta is extremely personal, but still touches on universal human experiences of birth, sexuality and death.

Born in Stockholm in 1980, Modigh spent her childhood in India and on Österlen in the south of Sweden. She studied photography in Copenhagen and Biskops Arnö from 2002-2007 and art at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm from 2012 to 2013. Through family relationships, she has realised many of her photographic projects in the USA. Modigh lives and works in the USA and Stockholm.