Casper Sejersen. Casper Sejersen. Casper Sejersen. For two years this name kept coming at me from all angles. Friends talked about him, how he worked with the director Lars von Trier. His photography was published in Vogue, and he shot back-to-back fall lookbooks for Dries Van Noten. Then I learned he created the green velvet apple that was the set for fellow Dane Cecilie Bahnsen’s Paris show. And that he photographed McQueen’s resort 2025 lookbook, published here earlier this week. My interest was piqued: Who is this guy?
Sejersen is a calm bearded Dane with interesting things to say about taking chances and the current state of fashion. When we talked, via Zoom, he was sporting a white shirt unbuttoned to reveal a golden pendant in the shape of the sun that showed to advantage his just-back-from-vacation tan. On his tattooed left hand one finger is stacked with rings. He possesses a kind of golden glow, not because of the jewelry, but because luck seems to be on his side.
Dreaming of becoming a rockstar, he moved to Copenagen and fell into photography. Von Trier’s office called out of the blue and gave him carte blanche to create Belongs to Joe, a photographic essay based on the script of Nymphomaniac, which has been described as a “visual history of eroticism.”
What I find so compelling about Sejersen’s work is that he takes pictures with a starling, almost crystalline clarity yet they aren’t necessarily about perfection. Often something’s “off,” but it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly why or how. It’s no surprise to me that one of Sejersen’s touchstones is The Little Prince, the book whose golden-haired space traveler hero said, “what is essential is invisible to the eye.” He’ll be shooting one of the up-and-coming brands at Copenhagen Fashion Week, a real boost for the label. I spoke to him about projects former and forthcoming.
Let’s start at the beginning; where are you from?
I am from the northern part of Denmark, from a city called Aalborg. At the time I grew up, it was kind of like the Danish Liverpool, a rough industrial city with a big shipyard, concrete factory, where schnapps is brewed. In high school I played drums and I thought I was going to be a rockstar with my band, so we moved to Copenhagen—at least most of us did. Then—I’ll try to give you the short version of a very long story—I needed new drums, I needed money for a private teacher, so I took a lot of different jobs.
At some point I shared a flat with three other people. One of the roommates was a documentary photographer whose brother was a famous commercial photographer here in Copenhagen. He needed help with cleaning his studio twice a week and he hired me to do that. So I just stumbled into the business, not with a creative vision, but through needing money for a new snare drum. After a few times cleaning his studio, I [noticed] he had a nice vinyl collection, a nice hi-fi; he had an espresso machine. Everything looked kind of chic. And I thought, I want to be a photographer. So, again, I started without any creative point of view, but then very fast I found out this is what I wanted to do.
What were the early years like?
I worked a lot after I started with him, and then changed to another commercial photographer, where we did big car and big beer campaigns, so very, very technical. I worked 16 hours every day, slept at the studio. I didn’t do any pictures on my own because I simply didn’t have the time for it. When I stopped working with him I didn’t know what I wanted to do, or anything about my style, but a lot of his clients came over to me. I just stumbled into a career without kind of having my own portfolio. I had a good business, so to speak, but I didn’t know what it was to be a photographer. At some point I was just about to quit; I was just doing bad ideas for bad art directors with no budgets and so on. I wanted to do something else, open a coffee shop or whatever. And at that time, I had been shooting for, I don’t know, 15 years on my own commercially here. I didn’t do any fashion at all. And suddenly one day Lars von Trier’s producer called me and asked if I wanted to do the campaign for Nymphomaniac.
Tell us more about that, please.
I had just about given up on being a photographer, but then I saw the cast and it was all my heroes: It was Charlotte [Gainsbourg], it was Uma [Thurman], it was all the best local actors, and Lars was actually one of the reasons why I started photography, because I just loved his first films.
I don’t know if you remember that campaign, but it was very humoristic. It was basically portraits on a white background of people having orgasms. I was skeptical because at that time, I was working in another style and so on. But the producer said, ‘Please trust me,’ and she sent me the script, [which] was written as a novel; it was three, four-hundred pages of literature, and it was so good, and I was just blown away. I wanted to do something with the script [apart from] the campaign. So I called Louise and said I wanted to do my own art project. I had researched and I found out that there are a lot of Hollywood books with behind-the-scenes pictures, but there had never been a book that was an interpretation from a still photographer of a manuscript. I wanted to do my own take on this. I wanted to do a kind of encyclopedia of Nymphomaniac, I wanted to kind of shoot artifacts. [They came back and said], Lars thinks it’s a brilliant idea, he only has one wish: It’s your project. We can support you if you want to shoot some of the actors, but you just take it away. When the book is printed and done, Lars will see it. He hates producers interfering in his stuff, so do what you want. He trusts you.
That’s major. How did you proceed?
A lot of the pictures I did before they shot the film so that I knew that I had a clean view on the aesthetic, and I was not copying anything from the film. I had artifacts; they sent me the whip, and I shot a tree in Germany that has kind of a central scene in the film, but I shot it in the way I thought it should be shot. I just had a feeling that this could be my way out of the photography I had been doing for so many years, because my hero had approved that I could do this project. I basically can’t remember the months that I did all the pictures for the book because everything was flowing for the first time in my life. The pictures were coming out without me thinking about them.
What was your entry into fashion photography?
So clip two: I went to Greece on Easter holiday with my family. There was no reception, only one spot where I could check my daily mail. There was a letter from Self-Service that I was about to delete, but it [turned out to be] from Marie-Amélie Sauvé asking if I wanted to shoot one of the five portfolio stories and one of the covers for issue 41 in 2014, for which she was the guest editor. I didn’t know who she was at all, because I was not in fashion. [I took the job and] was in the mix of kind of without knowing it. I just bypassed the whole system….
The magazine came out and I came back to my career here in Copenhagen. Then I got a call from a former agent in London saying, ‘We need to figure this out because this is a chance.’ From that day I just swapped; suddenly I changed seats in the car, so to speak, you know, going from the passenger seat to being in charge. Self-Service was my way into the fashion industry and that project made me realize what I wanted to do with my pictures in a way, and I haven’t looked back.
What is it that you want to do with your pictures? What’s your vision?
It’s hard to talk about your own approach. I [work in] several ways. If you are, for example, talking practically about studio versus location, I like to bring weird daily life details into my studio work, things that if you shot them on a location, you would retouch them away. When I’m shooting on location, I’m trying to get the location to look like a studio. So it’s kind of this no man’s land. I like juxtapositions, I like to have a concept, I like, sometimes, to have a complicated concept—and maybe it’s only me that will know what the concept is when the pictures have been made.
I love to put obstacles out for myself. I have rules because if you can do whatever then it can be too much, in a way. I like to create my sets. There are some references that always come up. I have stopped buying fashion magazines and looking at contemporary photography—not that I don t like it. I try to be inspired by everything other than photography: painting, sculptures, films…. I’m really attracted to words and sentences; if I read a sentence where an action is described, then I have my own, free way to interpret it. I listened to a podcast about how [David] Bowie did his lyrics; he said he just stole sentences and remixed them together.
It sounds like the biggest cliché, but I always end up using The Little Prince as a reference because all those planets are almost like small sets. [I recently did a shoot where we treated the talent] in a way where he could have his own planets. There was a little bonsai tree, a glass of milk, a Joan Didion book; things that are very simple and very iconic, but put together. It may not have a deep meaning, but when you look at the picture, you start to think about why the tree is to the side or linked to a glass of milk. I like these small planets; it always comes back to that book.
I’m curious what role intuition plays in your work.
It’s everything. I learned that from the commercial photographer I assisted: to be totally prepared, to have a plan A and a plan B and a plan C, so if you need to do a picture with blue skies and sunlight and it’s pouring down you can still achieve that picture. You have to know all your tricks, smoke and mirrors, to make the picture the client wants. If you’re prepared like that, then you can use your intuition on the shoot. Preparation gives you time to turn around and see a double rainbow in the other direction. Preparation and intuition go hand-in-hand.
What makes a good fashion picture?
It’s definitely about storytelling for me, and if I’m inspired by the talent. I am strongly inspired by shapes and textures and silhouettes. Again, I like juxtapositions. I love fashion when it’s super chic and elegant, but it also has kind of a stone in the shoe, so to speak, when something is kind of off, but mainly I love fashion that has my own kind of weird fetish things: I love beige, I love purple, I love leather; I love the texture of nylon, I love the texture of felt, I love to mix them. I love when things almost have that feeling of scratching nails on a blackboard, and when you have something organic with something very crisp and metallic in the same picture. It’s more like curating fashion in that way.
Can you tell us more about the big green velvet apple you designed for Cecilie Bahnsen’s fall 2024 runway show?
At first they asked me to do the photographs, and then they asked me to come up with a concept. If I should say I don’t see myself as a photographer, it was like when I played drums: when I got a camera in my hands it felt so natural to me. That’s what just happened to be my tool, but I’m so much more into ideas. So I came up with that big velvet apple. I really want to do more of that kind of thing, something that is physical, which maybe will be also the future as so much is done in AI now. There are 10 times more photographers with half of the jobs than just five years ago. You will always need to go into a physical room and smell something or see some alive; I can use the same textures as I like to photograph, but in a way so that people can actually touch them.
What changes have you observed in fashion since you took it up?
Even though we have access to everything and everything is digitalized now, I can see that the number of pictures floating around is getting smaller and smaller. It’s like fishing from a pond of 1,000 images. Because of Pinterest I have seen the Guinevere/Jil Sander picture from the ’90s with the wallpaper tapestry on 200 mood boards. I’m sounding super old when I’m saying that.
I stopped assisting in 1996, the year Google Search started, so if I had to do research for a project, I had to go to the library. There is no time for that now because all the mood boards and all the briefs are getting more and more narrowed-down. I think the reason that there was more original photography back in the days—and it’s the same with fashion—is because people are copying so fast.
The whole creative scene for designers and musicians and photographers is so much more democratic, which means, from what I’m seeing, that the middle ground has never been so big, there are thousands of really good talents. There’s still the same [limited] number of David Bowies, but the level just under is so big now.
Are you doing anything during Copenhagen Fashion Week?
I’m helping emerging brands that I really like. For example: Bonnetje. I’m shooting for them, my wife is styling.
Where do you think the industry is going next?
It’s really hard times at the moment, also for the big brands. I think that there will be a new approach. Talking from a photographer’s perspective, I think we’ve seen, I think it needs to change; we can’t have any more campaigns shot against white with logos; there must be a change into something that is more creative, more artistic again, like we saw in the ’90s. I hope that the suits can see that it’s going in the wrong way now. A lot of campaigns have been super boring and very safe; hopefully these guys will have a second look and see that they actually need to do something that is different from the others.
See more of Casper Sejersen’s fashion work.
