The Grand Gallery
Everything of me is inside this gallery. I remember what I felt in each photo—the struggle, the doubts, the fears—but also my many overcomings; I risked everything, my life, even my sanity all in order to bring this vision I carried inside of me to life.
The Egyptian Quest
Join me as I travel down the Nile in Egypt on a temple quest with broken hand and two cameras in my other, along with my spirit being severely tested.
The Geometry of Allah
An exploration into Islamic architecture and the mathematics of beauty. I explore the special geometry found in their structures and explain the meaning and significane behind the design.
About me
Hi, my name is Glenn. I’m 29 years old, and I’m a Norwegian photographer, videographer and storyteller. I'm captivated by the sublime, by that which is hard to pin down, but which we’ve all undoubtedly felt at some point in our lives. The feeling of being touched by the 'other', flickering through the seemingly impenetrable wall of the everyday mundane, and, if only for a moment, we are lifted off the grounds and we forget about ourselves; we forget about our worldly struggles, and we connect with something bigger than ourselves, and we feel intimately that everything is going to be okay, no matter what.
Then it vanishes.
I began my photography journey when I was walking through the city of Dubrovnik in Croatia, in 2019. This city's architecture seduced me: the brick-laid streets and its countless archways and domes. I had a sense everything here was made with love. I asked myself this: how can this life-affirming way, not be the norm? Shortly after I invested in a camera to explore this love I experienced further. Eventually it led me to start traveling the world on my own. To date I’ve visited over 30 countries. My debut trip was back in 2023 when I decided to travel Europe by train for a hundred days with two cameras in hand. I was searching for inspiration and meaning, and I found it; it was lingering in our architectural heritage; the human spirit infused in stone and glass. I think we knew something then that we don’t know now.
What can it be?
Arnkhafr
My middle name is Arnfinn, but I've undergone the task of renaming myself to Arnkhafr. I kept Arn, or eagle, 'ørn' as it in Old Norse, likened to the Egyptian falcon-headed god Horus, the God of attentive awareness, which as a photographer seems only fitting. Ka or kha is the rising spirit, or the essence of the soul, in Egyptian thinking. The word 'ankh' is also squeezed in there, separated by the 'r', which is the key of life. Meanwhile my first name, Glenn, is of Celtic origin, meaning valley. Together thus, my full name evokes the image of an eagle rising up from the valley and into the eternal morning light, transforming the world around him with the visions of what is beyond.
Vision
The dominant vision of life has sadly been reduced to the never-ending pursuit of money and vanity: we only care about profit, what someone can do for us, or what someone thinks of us. As a result we are slowly but surely losing our grip on what truly nourishes us. On what truly can satisfy us. Our collective story has unraveled, gone astray, and we're clambering to what little meaning is left in this world. They say we're supposed to invent our own meaning, and in a culture which heavily denies the reality of the imagination, they are in a way implying meaning doesn't exist, implying, in a way, you don't exist. This the collective distortion we're all living our lives under. It cannot go on.
We need to understand who, and what we once were to better understand who we can hope to become in the future. We do not understand the gravity of the situation that we're in, the responsibility that's resting on our shoulders. We need to understand that what we do here matters, it matters what every single person does. We are all responsible for the world not being as it could be. Some are more responsible than others, but everyone is responsible for the way they conduct their lives, in blissful ignorance or not. Every day our actions serve to pull us in one direction or the other, towards darkness or towards light. No one is coming to save us; we need to save ourselves, often from ourselves. And the way to do it is by first turning our vision, backwards, to look at those who came before, and to find out what they knew about life.
A spiritual war
You're in a spiritual war, and every day you're under attack. There are forces in the world which seeks to manipulate you, to win you over, and to make you believe certain things about yourself and about the universe which will hurt you, or rather, will make you hurt yourself. It's a battle for your soul. This force seeks to diminish human potential, and it's ultimate goal is to snuff out the divine spark we're all carrying within. It is a evil force, and the richest people on Earth has invited him in to take residence in their hearts. If you look around the world today, you will see the devastating effects it has had on us. We're left uninspired and in apathy by our meaningless and disordered cities. If you cannot understand why something is the way that it is, look at the consequences and infer the motivation.
Here's a newsflash for you;
The richest people on earth don't have the slighest clue what to do with all their money. They've consulted every expert, every oracle, they've thought of every possible outcome but they've all come up empty: they're afraid, estranged, and existing as creatures living in shadows of who they can be but have chosen not to. They operate in the shadows and they've adopted a distorted and dangerous view of life, and their state of mind is reflected on the world stage; it will reflects in how everything looks. And this is where architecture comes into the picture.
Architecture
If you want to understand a culture or a civilization of where they are, mentally and spiritually, it's very simple: you look at how they construct their houses and temples. You will come to know most things by this simple act of looking. If you look at ancient temples from around the world they are simply marvellous: beautiful beyond belief. But if you take a look at the major cities in the world today you will notice they are not. They're all funnily the same; oddly shaped, alien looking outcrops that certainly look nothing like anything we find in nature. They’re disharmonious. In short, they're ugly.
Our global society plainly lacks beauty, and their defenders use the same tactics when confronted with the question of meaning: you invent it. But I think we discover beauty, and we can either create towards it or protest against it. So are we truly progressing, or are we busy regressing by protesting against God?
Beauty
Beauty is my guide. It may seem superficial, but I let it lead me wherever it may. Beauty is a ladder: it is reflecting something true and good above which we step towards, and as we begin by appreciating physical beauty, we reach ever more refined and subtle forms of beauty; that of minds, of ideas, and finally the form of beauty itself, which is part of the three-fold nature of God. The philosopher Plato said that the key lay in the concepts of the good, the true, and the beautiful. These are the qualities of God. And the way to approach God and to bring him down from heaven to earth, is by setting the compass towards beauty.
“You are going to be condemned the consequences of your taste. And if you have no taste, God help you. Because you are self-condemned to an appalling nightmare. You won’t be getting it. All the subtle stuff will go by you while your head is filled can’ts, non-sense and foolishness. We need to be making choices based on beauty. And beauty is downloaded into the human milieu largely through dreams. That’s the way to set the compass. Not towards truth, not towards the good, not because these aren’t fine things but because they’re so slippery. But if you set it towards beauty you have all the force of life behind you, and hope follows as a natural consequence.”
- Terence McKenna
Beauty is the remedy, the goal, the magnetic northpole.
Now there's no secret I'm obsessed by temples and religious structures, just look at my page. I find they are often so beautiful; they're harmonious and complimentary with nature. They're symmetrical, carved in excruciating detail, and built with an intention of God and beauty in mind. The outside world reflects the inside world and vice-versa. The old temples around the world serves as echoes of a time when we were aligned to the inner workings of the cosmos.
In our world we are far from being aligned. We are destroying ourselves and the world around us. Our world is starving for realignment, for something that can once again lift our eyes to the heavens, to where they belong. Through my lens I search for beauty, to better inform our sense of taste, and to remember what truths we've forgotten about ourselves. I hope by shedding new light on our shared legacy around the world, I can offer a new and more beautiful vision for the future.
This is my Vision Quest.
