I've tried to tell the story of Otto a few times. None convinced me. The first versions started too tidy, as if the process had been a clean decision. It wasn't.

What I do know: it always starts with research. I look for photos of the animal head-on, read how it lives, understand what really sets it apart. With the arctic fox I found plenty of material — and at some point, looking at references and building the character in Photoshop from fragments, the collage stopped being a collage. It started being someone. That's what I care about happening. Not the technical moment when everything fits, but that other moment when the character seems to have a past.

With Otto that moment arrived through northern Norway. Kvaløya, the processing plant, the cold room at twenty below where you work as if it were an ordinary office. The routine of getting up at 3:15 without being told. And the lunchboxes — a veteran from Kirkenes who left soup in Otto's locker without saying anything, during the hardest stretch, when Ragnhild had just died. Otto took two weeks to respond: a packet of biscuits in the other's locker. From then on, like that. That model of caring without words, leaving something and waiting for the other to find it, struck me as exactly the gesture Otto had to be wearing.

The thick knit sweater with navy and mustard stripes came later. Wardrobe is always last — it arrives when I already know who the person is, not before. The navy docker hat too. I didn't pick them for visual whim. The process is closer to recognising than to designing.

This edition at 30 × 40 is the largest size in Drop 01. 35 copies in a pool · photographic copy Giclée · Hahnemühle Photo Rag · marco Hamburgo. At this scale Otto stops being a portrait you hang and becomes a presence that organises the whole room. The square keeps being square, but the size changes the contract: it's no longer the piece you glance at, it's the piece that decides how the rest get looked at.