Martina Hoogland Ivanow
In Conversation with Joanna Sandell Wright

Welcome to a conversation with Martina Hoogland Ivanow and Joanna Sandell Wright on photographic practice.

In Shadow Works, Living the Dream, Martina Hoogland Ivanow invites us into a world where photography becomes less a window onto reality than a field of emotional, psychological, and sensory negotiation. Her images–spanning three decades and brought together in her new book—inhabit the thresholds between presence and absence, clarity and obscurity, the seen and the intuited. Through analogue interventions, shadow, and reduction, she constructs a visual language that foregrounds what so often slips beyond the visible.

The upcoming conversation between Martina and Joanna unfolds precisely in this terrain: the spaces where image-making becomes a way of thinking, sensing, and questioning the contradictions of contemporary life. Drawing from the book’s newly edited constellation of works—including Speedway, Far Too Close, Satellite, Early Reading, Re-enactment, and Second Nature—the discussion turns to the nonlinear processes that shape Martina’s practice, her ongoing engagement with subcultures, rituals, and reenactments, and her reflections on abstraction, identity, and the fragile balance between human behaviour and the natural world.

As the book reveals, revisiting her archive has not only unearthed forgotten images but opened new lines of enquiry—about repetition, irrationality, and the ways we construct and perform the self. In dialogue with Joanna, Martina expands on these questions, tracing how photographic material, sound, and moving image intersect within her expanded practice, and how the act of obscuring or reducing information can intensify what lingers beneath the surface.

This conversation offers an entry point into the broader resonances of Shadow Works, Living the Dream: a three-decade journey into the tensions, desires, fears, and mythologies that shape how we see—and how we choose not to see.

Text by D. Duerr