When Elin Høyland heard about two elderly brothers, Harald and Mathias Ramen, living together in Tessanden, a small hamlet in rural Norway, she approached them to see if they would collaborate with her on a photographic project about their lives. The result, The Brothers, is a fascinating and warmly human study of a way of life that has now almost entirely disappeared. Harald (75) and Mathias (80) had always lived on the small farm in which they were born; neither had married. The book was published by Dewi Lewis in 2011 as a quarter bound hardback of 96 pages, 230 by 310 millimetres, with 47 duotone photographs.
Mathias once worked in Oslo for two months, but hadn’t liked it, whilst Harald spent one night, ‘the worst of his life,’ he would say, in a hotel in Lillehammer, some three hours away. They’d worked for an electricity company, as loggers and also as carpenters, but now much of their time was taken up just managing firewood for their home. As Harald said, they chopped wood, carried wood and burned wood. At least twice a day, they also fed wild birds in the twenty bird boxes that they monitored. Their days followed a predictable and comforting routine. In their free time they each listened to a radio or read the local paper. In the 1960s they rented a TV for a one month trial but returned it after deciding that it took up too much time.
Harald died from an asthma attack while shovelling snow in conditions of –20C. Mathias continued to live alone in the house until he moved into an old people’s home. He died in 2007.
Norwegian photographer Elin Høyland has freelanced for several major newspapers including The Guardian. She is currently photographer with the Norwegian Business Daily and her work has been widely exhibited in France, USA, China, Scandinavia and the UK. Gerry Badger, recognised worldwide as one of the leading writers on photography and co-author with Martin Parr of the two-volume The Photobook: A History, wrote the introduction. The book won the Documentary Book award at Moscow International Photo Awards 2014. This examination of a vanishing way of life, sustained by routine and place, remains a work of documentary photography at once specific and quietly universal.
Note on attribution: The Brothers is the work of Elin Høyland as photographer; Gerry Badger’s contribution is his introductory text, not photographic authorship.
