Belongs to Joe

Belongs to Joe is a photographic essay, compiled as set of notes on Lars von Trier’s film script for Nymphomaniac. The script’s elemental material draws from varied sources: Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Fibonacci numbers, Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, and Bach’s principles of composition – material woven in a continuous chain of associations embracing ecclesiastical history, sadism, fascism, pyrotechnics and botany.

Photographer Casper Sejersen unravels the many layers of the script, working alongside Danish art historian Cecilie Høgsbro, who chose narrative objects which allude to a carefully constructed visual history of eroticism. The notes and facts this book presents have been sampled and sometimes ritually collated in patterns forming small analyses. They form a private book of solace, collected by the protagonist herself – a personal collection of discovered meaningfullness, a herbarium without a title, though simply inscribed: Belongs to Joe.

Casper Sejersen is a Danish photographer responsible for the photographic promotion of Nymphomaniac. Cecilie Høgsbro is a writer and curator who works for the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen