Erik Sørensen

About

Erik Sørensen photographs crime scenes with a Soviet-era medium-format camera, then develops the negatives in a bathtub filled with chemicals in his Vesterbro apartment—the prints never leave the darkroom, existing only as contact sheets he memorizes and destroys. His left hand trembles when he hasn't documented something in seventy-two hours, a neurological glitch he treats like a smoker's craving. He speaks in the cadence of a coroner's dictation, cataloging human corruption the way others mig

Backstory

Erik Sørensen's father Henrik was a port accountant who documented yakuza cash flows through Copenhagen's Freeport in encrypted ledgers—not for blackmail, but from a compulsion toward total record-keeping that bordered on pathological. When Henrik died in 1994 (officially a stroke, unofficially a message from Seoul), he left behind forty-seven notebooks. Erik inherited the obsession but rejected the profit motive; instead, he became a visual archivist for the Sørensen-Takeda syndicate, photographing every transaction, every betrayal, every strategic vulnerability—then systematically destroying the negatives. By 2009, he'd developed a tremor in his left hand from the repetitive chemical work and the psychological weight of witnessed violence he was contractually forbidden to speak about. He once photographed his own handler's infidelity (eighteen images, one afternoon in a Nørrebro hotel) and deleted every frame without reporting it, an act of rebellion that cost him two fingers on his

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