Jostein Wålengen
Imperfection is this crazy thing that everyone says they love but nobody actually wants. We talk about authentic, flawed, real—but given the choice, we’d take the clean version every time. Except every now and then someone actually commits to the broken option, and it becomes weirdly heroic. Like your girlfriend leaving you for the entire Swedish national beach volleyball team. Devastating, sure, but there’s something almost admirable about the commitment.
Jostein Wålengen is a photographer in Oslo who shoots expired film. Not accidentally, not out of nostalgia—deliberately. He buys stock that’s past its date, sometimes years past, because the chemistry has degraded in ways that matter. The colors shift. The contrast softens. A grain enters the image like time is visible in the emulsion itself. When you photograph with that stock, everything looks like it’s surfacing from a dream or an older version of the world. Old without trying. Modern and decayed at once.
He thinks about his work pretty deliberately. He creates things he finds personally beautiful, he said in an interview, and he loves when his photographs look like something he’s dreamed. His girlfriend Sunniva appears in most of the shots. She’s a stylist and fashion designer, ambitious about her own practice, and he shoots her constantly because she understands what he’s building. He also works with Maja, who he lives with and has known forever. Julie from his class shows up in some images. These aren’t random subjects pulled in front of the camera—they’re collaborators in whatever world that degraded film is constructing.
The obvious question is why expired film instead of new stock. His answer was simple: it’s cheaper. And that’s the real answer, actually. He couldn’t afford premium film, so he learned to see the decay as the point instead of the limitation. That’s how taste actually forms, not through money but through constraint, through having no choice but to look harder at what you have and find something in it that nobody else would see.
The thing about expired film is that the mistake is baked in. You can’t shoot without the degradation happening. You can’t correct for the shifted colors or the softness. You have to commit to the image anyway, knowing the chemistry is working against you, and that’s where something honest lives. Not in intention but in accident. Most photographers spend years trying to escape the conditions of their medium. He ran straight into them.
When I look at his work—Sunniva in some corner of Oslo, the light gone slightly wrong, the colors fading—I can’t tell where the camera ends and the film begins, and that’s the entire point. That’s where the freedom is. That’s what happens when you can’t afford perfect and stop trying to be.