Nordic Girls

There’s a specific quality of light in Scandinavian photography I’ve never been able to fully explain—something cold and interior at the same time, like the subjects are lit from inside a winter window rather than by any external source. British photographer Curtis Blair has it across his entire analog series Nordic Girls, and it makes the work feel less like portraiture and more like memory.

Blair photographed Swedish models Jaana, Lina, Iris, Cecilia, and Linnea in London and Stockholm in April 2015, and the images deliver exactly what the title promises: women from Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Finland—in dark green pine forests, by clear lakes, in the warmth of their own homes. The northern cliché made honest through genuine affection for the subject.

He told C-Heads magazine that beyond the obvious—the height, the blonde hair, the kind of beauty that operates like an argument—he sees Nordic women as strong, free women who possess a great deal of self-respect. He talked about Arvid Byström and a generation of Nordic female artists reclaiming the body through work that didn’t flinch: body hair, menstruation, refusal to be decorative on anyone else’s terms. People will look back on this era as a golden age of Nordic women, he said.

I’m inclined to agree. The photographs are going into a book. I’ll be buying it.