Shaped by the Sea - an exhibition of black and white photographs of Grand Manan by Jorgen Klausen

Artist's Statement

I have been visiting Grand Manan every year since 1969. Since then I have taken over ten thousand photographic images of the island, primarily in black-and-white. It's from this body of work - a ten-year project - that I have chosen the photographs which make up Shaped by the Sea. For this exhibition I picked the ones that I personally like the best, not the most commercial.

What I want to capture in these photographs is a vision of Grand Manan as it appeared at the end of the twentieth century. I have attempted to express the essence of the island which for me is always a magical place. The light is wonderful. It changes all the time; the fog rolls in and then a minute later it burns off. Things appear and disappear like magic. There's so much atmosphere. I go back to some of these locations time after time and the light is always different.

The symmetry of the fishing weirs is another thing that fascinates me. Weir fishing is unique to the Bay of Fundy and the weirs have a Zen simplicity - the impact of simple sticks in the water is amazing. While I get up early to explore the island's unique flora and fauna (there are wild orchids here that grow nowhere else) my favourite thing to photograph is rock.   

The island has fantastic basalt rocks. They have wonderful shapes - sometimes they look like stairs, in other places they are worn into smooth shapes. Basalt rock is found in Grand Manan, and across the Bay of Fundy in Briar Island, only reappearing on the west coast of Ireland at the Devil's Causeway. These rock formations are absolutely majestic; when I am surrounded by these natural columns of rock, I'm looking at God's architecture and it is perfect. 

Although the rock formations never fail to inspire me - as does the fog, the ever-changing light, the smokehouses and the fishing boats - I'm also interested in the activities of the islanders. The people are wonderful. I like to photograph people who have experienced the unique island life; so much character shows in their faces. These photographs form a vignette of what people looked like and the activities they were engaged in and I believe these images have true value as historic documents, a record of how Grand Mananers lived.

My photographic influences include Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Paul Caponigro, Paul Strand, Judith Dater and Imogen Cunningham and I work predominantly with a 35mm camera preferring it over larger format camera because of the versatility in its range of lenses. I'm a purist - I use only available light, even in my portraits. My camera is a 35mm Nikon F 4a with 24mm to 300mm Nikon lenses. The film is Kodak Tmax100 which I developed with Kodak Tmax and fixed with Ilford Universal. My enlarger is an Omega B22, cold light head, with an El-Nikkor 35mm lens. The paper I chose for this project is Agfa Multicontrast, classic, glossy and the prints were developed in Kodak Dektol with a stop bath of Kodak 28% acetic acid solution and Ilford Universal fixer. The toner is Selenium in Perma Wash (5 min) with a wash of one hour at 68 degrees F. in a Patterson Archival Print washer. After drying on air-fibreglass screens, the images are mounted with four-ply acid free 100% rag mat in Tempo metal frames with regular glass.

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