In The Wild Duck, Hjalmar Ekdal appears as a portrait of a creative person who does not succeed in expressing what is inside of him. He is trying to refine photographic techniques in the form of an invention that he hopes will make him rich and famous, restore the family´s honour and secure his daughter Hedvig´s economic future.
Carlsen's pictures do not function as explicit interpretations of scenes from Ibsen, and relating them to the text becomes more a question of observing how he gives his imagination free rein around certain elements of the story. Carlsen thus places himself within the modernistic tradition of illustration, which in a greater degree than earlier perceives the images as autonomous interpretations theat form their own independent world - a world that is only loosely connected to the text.
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