Hello, my name is Jens. I started shooting short 8mm stop motion films at the age of eight and stills shortly thereafter. Although my father was a struggling artist and always short of money, he allowed me to shoot with his trusted EXACTA VAREX IIa – as much film as I wanted.
My father and I developed the black-and-white films and made prints in the apartment bathroom in Nørrebro, Copenhagen. Our bathroom was so small that we had to place the old Durst M30 enlarger on the toilet seat and the chemical baths on the floor...! We mixed our own silver bromide film emulsion and painted it onto watercolour paper, which we then exposed and developed. Camera and film in all its forms was my first and perhaps greatest love, one that captivated me long before music, philosophy, and all the other worlds that has influenced me in the years since.
My father always had unexposed film lying around in his studio in-between brushes, oil colours, and canvases, and I was allowed to expose as much film as I liked; I was happy to use whatever I could get my hands on: Ilford FP4 (and later HP5), Kodak Tri-X Pan, Kodachrome, Kodachrome II slides.
All pictures on this website © Jens Skou Olsen, 2023.
Please do not use my images without permission.
Please do not use my images without permission.
