Gomma Photography Grant 2025
A Quiet Distance
Photographer
Lisen Stibeck
A Quiet Distance
15 Feb, 2026
This project explores how the feminine gaze perceives and translates the world — not as an ideal or a theory, but as a lived, embodied experience. The series moves between portraiture and landscape, between the human body and organic forms, creating a dialogue between strength and fragility, intimacy and distance.The photographs were made across different seasons and locations. They carry a quiet tension — moments of stillness that suggest movement, and gestures that hover between presence and disappearance.The title A Quiet Distance refers to the subtle space between what is seen and what is felt — a distance that is not separation, but attention. It reflects the way I approach my subjects: with calm observation, allowing emotion and form to coexist without the need for resolution.Together, the images form a visual language of the feminine point of view — intuitive, non-linear, and attentive to what is often overlooked.
About the photographer
Lisen Stibeck
Photographic artist Lisen Stibeck works on long-term projects.Her interest in teenage identity developed into the photobook Daughters, which gained critical attention and received international awards. More recently, her focus has turned inward, exploring the inner landscape and opening a world of dreams — a form of magical realism. Her work Undertow is a meditation on life and death.In Women in the Flow, she creates a kaleidoscope of images tracing the lives of women across time, continents, and cultures — through different stages of life. The work unfolds as a veiled portrait: a fleeting body accompanied by poetic fragments.Her latest project, A Quiet Distance, moves away from presenting femininity as an idealized abstraction. Instead, Stibeck approaches it as a lived and tangible force — at once fragile and resilient, intimate and expansive. Her photographs engage with what often remains unseen: the subtle, the bodily, the organic, the non-linear.Stibeck’s work articulates a visual language of the feminine — one that invites the viewer to pause, slow down, and encounter the overlooked with attentiveness and depth.Lisen Stibeck is based in Sweden and regularly spends time in Morocco and France.
