The ubiquitous photography curator and writer David Campany is rarely at a loss for words, but in his foreword to Rune Johansen: My Last Pictures — a monograph of the Norwegian photographer — he seems to struggle with the task of describing what he is seeing. Campany reaches for comparisons with the work of Diane Arbus and Walker Evans, only to, a moment later, place his work alongside the intimacy of the family album.

The northern part of Norway near the Arctic Circle — where Johansen has lived all his life — has had little attention in the photography world. We’ll look at this book which covers his work from 1991 to 2014 — when his beloved Hasselblad camera was stolen, marking the end of an era in his career — to try to understand where these far-reaching comparisons to the work of Arbus and Walker Evans come from.