ARTIST FOLLOW UP // Photographer Johanna Heldebro Takes Haunting Body of Work Global

Ed. note: You may have glimpsed this post quickly last Tuesday, though a couple minor corrections were needed so we pulled it down temporarily.

In the two years since her exhibit To Come Within Reach of You... hung at 3rd Ward's Fall Solo Show, photographer Johanna Heldebro has been busy showing the series around the world.

To give you the body's backdrop:

Heldebro and her father became distant after her parents divorced. He left to essentially live with a second family in his native Sweden. Heldebro traveled to Stockholm and (unbeknownst to him) follow him; taking pictures of his house, zooming in through his windows. She never took pictures of his girlfriend or children, only him. The resulting images are both incredibly intimate and heartbreakingly distant. And as of this month, the work reaches an even larger global audience.

In Moscow, she's showing To Come Within Reach of You... as part of an exhibition called Wrong Address, which opened on September 22 at the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art and runs until October 31.  She tells us "It is curated by Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger (Chief Curator at the Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki) and Tero Puha (a Finnish visual artist) and the show also includes work by Tero Puha, Minna Suoniemi, Pilvi Takala, Jarkko Räsänen and Taus Makhacheva."

From there, Heldebro's work returns to Sweden; the Galleri Box in Gothenburg--running from October 13 until November 14. But don't expect her father to show up.  When asked if she's become closer with him since the show's become successful, her response: "Becoming closer to someone is different from developing a relationship with someone. Our relationship is that he is my father, I am his daughter." 

--Layla Schlack