Former NJP photographer Terje Abusdal won the 2017 Nordic Dummy Awards. Damian Heinisch also figures on the list of finalists.
Abusdal won the award for his project Slash & Burn, which also gained international notoriety by winning the Leica Oscar Barnack Award earlier this year. The jury for the Nordic Dummy Awards made the following statement about Abusdal’s project:
«The jury selects Terje Abusdal’s dummy Slash & Burn as the winner of the Nordic Dummy Award 2017. The project takes an open and vigilant approach towards different photographic genres by rhythmically juxtaposing documentary, archival and staged photography.
With this approach, the reader’s curiosity is nurtured and drawn into the little known story of a Finnish minority group that originally settled along the Swedish-Norwegian border in the 1600s. The title of the book, Slash & Burn, refers to the technique the so-called Forest Finns used to cultivate land, slashing and burning trees to grow their crops, and leaving a place once the land had been exhausted.»
The list of nominees for this year’s award also included current NJP participant Damian Heinisch, with his project Fünfundvierzig.
The dummies submitted by the winner and the finalists are currently on tour in the Nordic countries; on 4 December, the exhibition will open at the Centre For Photography in Stockholm. The dummies will subsequently be shown on Iceland, and in Tromsø, Helsinki and Malmö.
Read more about the Nordic Dummy Awards here.
