Never Run Faster Than Your Guardian Angel Can Fly by Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer
Never Run Faster Than Your Guardian Angel Can Fly, published 2020.

Buy Never Run Faster Than Your Guardian Angel Can Fly here.

With her camera, Fryd Frydendahl makes the well-known seem strange. She moves in so close that the outline of things disappears, and you stare aimlessly into something which fascinates because you do not know what it is. Here is something that glows red and orange behind glass. There are stems or threads in it, but what is it? 

Like the surrealists, she loves the mouth. The lips, teeth, and tongue, which can blow chewing gum bubbles, bite and twist around a necklace. She also photographs the skin. In previous works, she has played with textiles or leaves covering the skin or creating light patterns on its surface. Now she is experimenting with the skin itself, using a solarization effect, getting it to darken, while at the same time toning blue or green. It makes the skin seem metallic or like glass.

But this is not Man Ray gazing at Lee Miller. For over 15 years, Fryd has photographed her two nephews. Late in 2016 the book Nephews was published, a monumental work with photographs of the boys taken since the death of their mother and Fryd’s sister in 2003. It is a family album where the staging they do together runs like a red thread of life on a background of black grief. Fryd still photographs them. Andreas has become a young man: no nerf guns and Inflatable Pool Floats. With a big, boyish, but also manly body that continues to participate in formalistic experiments.

Nature has formed the background in many of Fryd’s pictures. She has photographed the garden in Hvide Sande with leaves and flowers as color bombs in the photos. Now nature appears more kitsch. A romantic image of apple blossoms in the sunshine, but also strangely artificial images of flowers in cellophane, serrated sunflowers. They seem reminiscent of the surrealists’ brûlages where negatives were chemically distorted, or marbled paper, also created by manual processes, and yet very different. 

There is a new coolness to these works. Images are distorted or morphed in sections. The attentive eye sees how the line of leaves, and also the lashes and the iris in the images of eyes are not straight, but zigzagged. It’s like a glitch, but an intentional one, created for the sake of aesthetics. It’s related to the brûlages but as so often in Fryd’s work it’s an unconscious interpretation with a different, digital coolness. 

It’s smooth, however not as smooth as the series of product photographs that appear continuously throughout the book. During her COVID-19 exile in Hvide Sande, Fryd has photographed a range of fishing tackle from the family company Frydendahl Fishing Nets. Ropes and scissors, gloves, and carabiners. The objects stand as if stenciled onto the white background. There is rarely a shadow, and if there is, it is entirely stylized. This makes the structure of the materials stand out more clearly.

Product photographers of the interwar period would have referred to that effect as the metallicity of the metal. Very often Fryd is close to the surrealists, but in these images, there is a clear relationship with the German Neues Sehen photographers who took pictures of nondescript industrial products. They mastered setting light and focus so that the shapes and structures of things appeared razor-sharp in the photographs.

The nylon-ness of the nylon rope. The nylon that is so new and so tight and uniformly knotted that it cuts into your eyes. It repels and attracts at the same time. Not unlike present day kinetic sand that is sliced ​​into pieces in those Oddly Satisfying videos on YouTube. Some will say that Fryd’s product photographs are far from the sensuous surrealistic photographs of skin and fruit. But just as the so-called ‘objective photography’ of the Neues Sehen movement was never completely objective and foreign to surrealism, and just as stern product photography could look uncanny and surreal, so do the borders blur in Fryd’s universe. The product photographs add a new clue to the alien in the familiar. It is an objective chance that ”Cross-braided Danline with and without heart” and ”Blue Star. Black rubber glove” end here.

Never Run Faster Than Your Guardian Angel Can Fly is a collaboration between Fryd Frydendahl and myself. In April 2020 Fryd asked me if I was interested in writing an essay or an intro to a book with new works of hers. In August 2018 we had had a very inspiring conversation when I hosted a talk by Fryd at the Royal Danish Library. Fryd always impresses me with her will to experiment and I take pleasure in understanding her artistic development as well as what I see as her ongoing conversation with art history and pop culture. To me, this looks like pure surrealist sensibility and reminds me of the interwar European photography which I have written about extensively. 

After seeing the first photographs - Fryd was posting them continuously so that I could follow the progress of the works and the book - I hadn’t written many words before I understood that Fryd’s work did not only appeal to me as a scholar. Words and short sentences of a more personal, perhaps fictional kind emerged. I think they were helped along the way by the inspirational quotes which were already governing Fryd’s project. In May 2018 she had asked people to send her their favorite inspirational quotes, and she was now choosing from and grouping images under these. 

These quotes, harvested from Facebook — a goldmine for everyone searching for what André Breton once called the “gold of time” — appeared here to me as clues that could be understood as Fryd’s tongue in cheek dance with Western Art History. They could well be considered a contemporary version of the enigmatic titles of canonical surrealist works like those of Salvador Dali as well as Wilhelm Freddie. While working to phrase this as an excited but concise analysis, I sensed that it also sparked something else in my writing. 

Still hesitant about this other voice I showed some of the sentences to Fryd and asked how she felt about it. As she responded positively, I carried on. What began as Fryd’s photographs and chosen quotes evolved into a dialogue in which I was not only thinking about her work but also taking part in creating it. 

The result is a hybrid work consisting of texts (inspirational quotes) and photographs collected and taken by Fryd and texts and quotes written and collected by me as a response to Fryd’s work. Hans Munk from At Last Books has played an important role in orchestrating everything into a compellingly designed narrative. 

I still haven’t nailed the relationship between the inspirational quotes and the titles of surrealist artworks but I will be working on it as I will continue to understand Fryd’s work through the lens of classical surrealism as well as commercial photography of that period.