The series Easyjet (2011) came first out of SOPHIE JUNG‘s experience of seemingly constant travel: For the last 2 years I’ve commuted between Amsterdam and Basel to be with my lover. During this constant to and fro I anchored my place in seat Nr.15 on the left. 

Time after time, her flight would disappear into the clouds and emerge into the brilliant light beyond. Each image at first appears as a simple, almost artifical gradient or flat color. Against the changing atmosphere, a fragment; a reversed Easyjet wing tip which turns the picture into a nearly abstract image.

My practice is involved with photography and its pitfalls, both culturally as a medium and personally as a way to track and record life. I regularly negotiate between form and affect, pragmatism and romance, between scrutinizing accuracy and magical awe for the medium. My work is strict, slick and abstract as well as emotionally involved, performative and overly literal. I am interested in the performative aspect of images – the secret, subliminal messaging, the assumed and the constructed. The crossing of the straight, clean scaffolding: form, structure, rhythm with the messy, whimsical, perturbed and oddly sentimental is the underlying tone in my work, be it video, performance, sculpture, text or photography.

SOPHIE JUNG was born in 1982 in Luxemburg and grew up in Germany and Switzerland. She studied Photography and Media Arts at the Folkwang school in Essen, the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste and graduated 2011 from the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam.

And good news: She’s just won the Prix Photographique de la Ville de Levallois 2012 for her series EasyJet (2011). With this prize, her work will be exhibited at the 5th edition of the festival Photo Levallois scheduled to take place from October 5 through November 17 2012.