Photographs

The first major publication dedicated to one of Norway's most important photographers Working in a signature modulating gray scale, the late Norwegian photographer Tom Sandberg spent decades rendering the world according to an exacting vision, training his eye on the shapes and forms of the everyday—dark abstractions of asphalt and sea, the hard edges of an automobile, an ominously curved tunnel, an anonymous figure casting a shadow—to plumb the nature of photographic seeing. His pictures are subtle yet transformative, studies of stillness that radiate mystery. A perfectionist in the darkroom, Sandberg was acutely sensitive to the rich spectrum of black and white, and his handmade prints, at times printed on aluminum and canvas, project a powerful physical presence. Although Sandberg is esteemed in his native Norway and throughout Scandinavia and Europe, his oeuvre is less known in the United States and other parts of the world. This monograph, produced in close collaboration with the Tom Sandberg Foundation in Oslo, is a long-overdue celebration of this distinguished artist.

Tom Sandberg (1953–2014; born in Narvik, Norway) worked and lived in Oslo. In the early 1970s, he studied photography at Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham, UK, where Thomas Joshua Cooper, Paul Hill, and Minor White were among his teachers. Sandberg’s early work was among the first acquisitions of photography by the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo. His work is held in the collections of numerous other museums, as well as in public and private collections, including those of Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; and Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.