For Astrid Kruse Jensen, who grew up in North Jutland, Denmark, the dramatic differences between winter darkness and summer light have always deeply influenced her photographic work. Working at night, manipulating the available light with artificial light, her complex technical methods result in ‘silent’, sometimes surreal scenarios: dark woods, lone trees, isolated houses and small-town streets. What they all share is a mysterious cinematic quality.

The series Imaginary Realities, Parallel Landscapes and Hypernatural were created over several years; clusters of images linked by their shifting and interacting locations, subjects, lighting and technical details.

Kruse Jensen made a dramatic shift in her work with the introduction of a woman wearing red. This woman becomes the narrative motif, depicted in segments that detail fabrics and designs, and always facing away from the camera. One is reminded of Harry Callaghan’s rear view of a woman in red (his wife, Eleanor) on a Chicago street.

The emptiness and silence of Kruse Jensen’s work suggest dream-states and Kruse Jensen has described her work as ‘the meeting of the alienation between humans and nature; the reality of the spaces depicted and the fiction of the images represented’. The woman in red makes a final appearance, in a starkly lit and sharply focused analogue print entitled She Was Looking For Herself. Standing with her back to the camera, on a jetty reaching into a lake, the woman stares into the darkness ahead – her future or her past. The most dramatic change in Kruse Jensen’s work is in her recent series Disappearing into the Past (2010) when she begins to use Polaroid, exploiting the effects of a process damaged by age. In doing so, she enters a different realm in narrative terms: psychoanalysis, memory and false memories.

Using damaged film creates a layered and blurred effect, and involves none of the planning required for the clinically perfect, elegantly lit frozen scenarios that Kruse Jensen is also known for. She surrenders herself to the unpredictability of Polaroid and, as a consequence, creates ‘soft’, pastel images imbued with an aura of romanticism. Faint, faded scenes focus on a lake and the surrounding trees, reminiscent of Denmark’s nineteenth-century Skagen painters whose impressionists pictures of women on beaches, walking away from the artist, share equally muted hues.

Kruse Jensen has grasped the magical potential of outdated film onto which light has leaked or the emulsion deteriorated. From her choreographed, carefully designed and lit sets, she deploys a process that is hard to control, creating blurry and over-exposed scenes; images affected by chemistry and time. Most beautiful are the feathery patterns amongst the trees, resembling early nineteenth-century camera-less prints.

Aside from the sublime beauty of Disappearing into the Past, the intriguing mystery of the images remains unexplained and constantly leads us into the unknown – our unknown. From the infinite blackness surrounding the jetty to the lure of the steps leading into the water, they straddle future and past memories, dreams and reality.