The Cave. A solitary island sculpted by volcanic powers, waves and time rises from the sea, its hollow cave opening like a blind Cyclops’ eye. No wonder Fingal’s Cave on the island of Staffa, Inner Hebrides, has been a source of inspiration for many generations of artists, poets, and composers. i It has lured people with its mysterious looks and, in particular, with the eerie melodies the natural acoustics of the cave produce: a dark, empty sound. Ebbe Stub Wittrup photographed this majestic site in 2011. The composition of the photograph is literally as solid as a rock uniting, with the golden section, all visual elements so that they lead the gaze towards the deep blackness of the cave, past the half-opened stone curtains. By its very nature, this is a document, an image based on the presence of the subject itself. ii It does not require any special technical effects; the sensitiveness of the photograph(er) transmits the timeless genius loci.

The Devil. During 2009 and 2010, Stub Wittrup photographed medieval bridges in different regions of Southern Europe. The black-and-white prints are quiet and peaceful notes on man-made wonders devoid of living beings. But these photographs carry, discreetly, a plethora of local myths and stories relating to the different roles played by the devil during the challenging construction period.

The Ghost. In the series Presumed Reality (2010) a ghostly motif enters the stage, in the form of blurred figures of hikers in the midst of wilderness. The artist has digitally transformed the original material – a set of faded slides depicting tourist activities in Norway in the 1950s. Once-recognisable features of individuals melt into soft colour fields, complementing the misty landscape. The process of amnesia is suggested in the gradual disappearance of people’s features, and our memories of them. In one image, a solitary man in front of a grand natural vista has turned his back on us, deep in contemplation. This figure echoes that of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above The Sea Fog (c 1818), a favourite Romantic figure repeatedly reincarnated by contemporary art photography.

The Medium. A more experimental, literally hypersensitive adaptation of a documentary image appears in the series Ten Sealed Images (2012), a joint venture by Stub Wittrup and Troels Sandegård. Ten photographs of different origins and periods of time were given to a well-known Danish clairvoyant – ‘one who sees clearly’. With her paranormal skills, the medium gave a short description of the content of each nonvisible image sealed in tin foil inside an envelope. iii The first in the series contained a picture of a sinking oil tanker from 2004. The medium sensed the disaster in the hidden image: ‘…like a construction of some kind in a kind of landscape. It could be a house, but I’m in doubt about the house; it could also be a tower. I’m also thinking about some trees. It’s very quiet, not much is happening’.

Ebbe Stub Wittrup’s photographs are sensitively muted, polyphonic narratives played with silent notes. He is almost Proustian in his sense of remembering – and representing – things past.

i For example, Felix Mendelssohn, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Lord Tennyson, J.M.W. Turner, August Strindberg, Sir Walter Scott, Jules Verne, and Queen Victoria. More recently the cave appeared in Matthew Barney’s film Cremaster 3 (2002)

ii ‘Is a star a document? Is a pebble rolled by a torrent a document? Is a living animal a document? No. But the photographs and the catalogues of stars, the stones in a museum of mineralogy, and the animals that are catalogued and shown in a zoo, are documents.’ Suzanne Brie, What is Documentation? (Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press Inc, 2006) 10.

iii The series was inspired by Soviet experiments in the 1950s when parapsychological methods were tested in the use of espionage. Ten Sealed Images is based on an experiment that was carried out in February 2010 by The Danish Society for Psychical Research.