On summer nights in Norway, it is possible to see the sun touch the horizon, only to rise again almost immediately. It is certainly a disorienting experience, having daylight all the time, even at night. This is the feeling behind Shadows of Summer, the ongoing photographic project by Ann Cathrin Buchardt.

A Norwegian photographer, Buchardt has been working for years through subtraction, not taking anything away from her photographs but rather aiming to leave only what is essential. In this case, it is color that disappears. Shadows of Summer is a black-and-white project created along Norway’s southeastern coast, in the places where the photographer spent many of her summers and which she has photographed over the years.

The chosen style contains a strong contradiction: the most vibrant and colorful season of the year loses its colors here. By stripping the images of color, Ann Cathrin Buchardt dismantles the reassuring iconography of summer and gives the landscapes a strange stillness that seems to precede or follow something we cannot know. It is no coincidence that the artist describes it as a subtle sense of unease, a premonition brewing beneath the perpetual light, like dark waters concealing silent depths where daylight cannot reach.

The images move between two registers. On the one hand, nature, with low and threatening clouds, tall grass moved by the wind, and stones smoothed by water. On the other, human bodies: figures floating motionless in dark water, a face emerging from the shadows with eyes already looking elsewhere. They are presences rather than portraits, bodies that seem to be part of the landscape themselves.

Water is a recurring element, acting as a mirror, a threshold, and a surface reflecting the sky. In this sense, Ann Cathrin Buchardt seems to engage, perhaps unconsciously, with a certain Nordic visual tradition (Munch, for example), in which the landscape is never merely a backdrop but a projection of a state of mind.