“Only connect! That was her whole sermon.”

– E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910)

Writing more than a hundred years ago, the British novelist E. M. Forster foresaw the ways in which the technologies emerging in the 19th and early 20th centuries would disconnect us from each other, from the physical world, and from direct experience. Radios, telephones, films, photographs, telegraphs, cars, trains, airplanes, all with their promises to make the world smaller and bring us closer together … yet look at us now, arguably more alienated and isolated than ever before.

“To Belong” serves as the chosen theme for this 2025 edition of an established, annual, collaborative exhibition of work by a cross-section of young Nordic photography students. They have grown up taking for granted the most recent iterations of the technologies whose dangers Forster predicted: faster trains, planes, and cars, of course, but also computers, cellphones, digital still and video images, social media, the internet. From their idiosyncratic responses to the concept of belonging, two recurrent patterns emerge. The first addresses their engagement with others; the second reflects acceptance of their existential solitude.