The scenes of group excursions in the Norwegian and Swiss mountain landscape are taken from slides from the 1950s that Ebbe Stub Wittrup found at flea markets. He enlarged and reworked them in such a way as to blur the perception of reality, notably by reversing the focus.

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“The members of the hiking party itself take center stage. Often it is the interaction and dynamics between group members, and between the hikers and nature, that constitute the thrust of the photos. The original documentary value that the images must be assumed to have had is not eliminated, but slips into the background. Instead of laying the stress on the photographs' documentary potential, Stub Wittrup displaces interest onto their purely visual aspects. By means of digital manipulation, parts of the subjects are blurred out while others retain their original distinctness. In some instances, Stub Wittrup has actually removed elements and added others, so that the integrity of the original is definitively jettisoned. For at first glance, the pictures appear as conventional photographs-realistic depictions of situations, geologicalformations, mountaintops, clouds. We presume that we are looking at the world as it was then. But that reality has undergone a slight edit in pictorial terms, with subtle stylizations and abstractions having been brought into play. The faces are blurred out, clothes and coiffures are mutated into irregular splotches or present as monochrome areas with clearly delineated folds. The natural logic of field depth is subverted in that narrow, sharplydepicted fields occur variously across the pictorial space. The result is a clutch of mildly confusing pictures which in virtue of their deliberately blurred elements read as a curious blend of photographic realism and painting’s gentle sfumato.”

From an essay by Rune Gade, Presumed Reality, Hatje Cantz, 2011