‘Was it a woman who bit off his ear?’: the wild life and serene images of Tom Sandberg | Photography

Norway has by no means appeared as moist as within the pictures of the late Tom Sandberg. There are photographs of drizzle and puddles, of asphalt slick with mizzle. A ripple of water seems to have a gap in it, a determine looms behind a rain-dappled window, a gutter glows after a downpour.

Shot in both daring chiaroscuro or mild orchestrations of greys, these are footage with the facility to make the on a regular basis appear dreamlike. But they’re additionally uplifting, in a complicated type of manner, like being informed to decorate for solar even when the clouds are black.

Sandberg, as a brand new retrospective at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter subsequent to the Oslo fjord makes clear, was not solely Norway’s most well-known photographer, pivotal in making the medium a critical artwork type within the Nordic area in the course of the Nineteen Eighties and Nineties. He was additionally a paradoxical character: hard-living, erratic, with a propensity for fanning his personal fable along with his tongue firmly in his cheek – and but in a position to produce compositions which are contemplative, calming and uplifting.

Covering 4 a long time, from scholar work taken within the mid-Seventies by to footage made shortly earlier than his demise in 2014, Tom Sandberg: Vibrant World is the primary main Sandberg present since his demise aged 60. The setting is apt: Sandberg was as soon as the in-house photographer at Henie Onstad, capturing artwork happenings in its galleries and making intently cropped, vastly enlarged, monochrome portraits of visiting dignitaries, together with the composer John Cage and the artist Christo. They are topographical of their scrutiny of pitted, sandpapery pores and skin.

He was born in 1953 within the city of Narvik on the coast of northern Norway. The household subsequently moved to Oslo, the place Tom’s father labored as a photojournalist. “His father took him to the darkroom for the first time and exposed Tom’s hand on the photo paper. He said he was immediately smitten by that alchemical magic and never looked back,” recollects the artwork historian Torunn Liven, a long-time pal and trustee of the Tom Sandberg Foundation.

After his father deserted the household, Sandberg helped his mom increase his sister in a tough suburb of the town. In the mid Seventies, he studied images at what’s now Nottingham Trent University, the place he was taught by the American photographer Minor White.

Sandberg thought of the darkroom course of, by which he experimented with supplies and retouching, to be a pivotal a part of image-making. And, as his observe progressed, his prints grew to become bigger, virtually cinematic. A noirish inside of the lounge at Oslo’s Gardermoen airport may very well be a movie nonetheless from a Wim Wenders function.

He returned to Oslo within the late Seventies, and started collaborating with printers and designers. Though he developed an curiosity in Zen-like compositions, his social life was removed from monk-like.

“Tom had a huge social capacity. When he went in a taxi, he’d make friends with the taxi driver. He was friends with Norway’s crown princess,” says Liven. “He had a large need and capacity for having people around him. I think that unrest is the shadow side of that liveliness. And that, in a sense, his work arrested that unrest.”

Liven recollects how Sandberg had a selected affinity with younger photographers who sought to be taught his “wizard darkroom skills” and cautious modifying course of, an old-school meticulous, intuitive and gradual manner of working. “We are very happy at the foundation that all the 15-year-olds from the secondary schools in the county around the museum area will participate in a workshop inspired by the Henie Onstad exhibition,” says Liven. “The teenagers will be restricted to work on one single picture, instead of the usual overload of endless digital snapshots.”

Morten Andenæs, Sandberg’s former assistant, photographer and co-curator (with Susanne Østby Sæther) of the Henie Onstad exhibition, recollects his unruly moments in addition to his productiveness. “He was a wild soul,” he says. “He was one of those guys with a wry smile. He didn’t take himself seriously but he took his work very seriously. It was how he dealt with existential issues.” Sandberg struggled with alcohol and substance abuse, says Andenæs. “He would periodically go on benders.”

Sandberg informed Andenæs that “if it weren’t for photography he’d probably go to the hounds.” Rumours swirled round him. “If you look at his ear in portraits, part of it is missing. And how did that happen? I think he loved myth-making. Like, was it a woman who bit off his ear? That kind of stuff,” says Andenæs. “He would tell interviewers that he dreamt in black and white.”

Although Sandberg’s obsessive methodology, poetic sensibility and pared-back subject material suggests a modernist lone wolf – his pictures usually function solitary figures with their again turned to the digicam – he was no recluse. “He was seen by everyone he drew into his orbit,” notes Andenæs. “And he had a drive and intuition that rumbled on like a lorry without brakes.”

His human topics are actually research of unusual shapes. In one, a person seems to bounce along with his personal shadow. In the early 2000s, he photographed his younger daughter, Marie, as a whirligig of blonde hair. He shot human doodles.

“I don’t think he was one thing. He was a diverse person,” Marie, who’s now 30 and has been on the helm of her father’s property for greater than a decade, tells me. “He was a very funny person and charismatic. But not always easy to be with.”

How was he as a father? “He was always very protective of me when I was a child. We had many different chapters as well. And I chose to live with him when he didn’t have the best time of his life,” Marie says. She sees the images he took of her as a type of self-portraiture. “I think he saw a lot of himself in me.”

Marie recollects how her father would take his digicam bag with him in every single place. “To go from our house to the tram it could take anything from 10 minutes to two hours. He was taking pictures of me, the street, the sky, the ground. He just saw moments he wanted to capture.” That engagement along with his topics and environment prolonged to his friendships, as Morten Andenæs recollects: “Being in his company felt like the sun was shining on you.”

There have been some durations of sharpness and sobriety. In his lifetime, he noticed appreciable success, together with a solo present at MoMA Ps1 in New York in 2007, and his legacy continues to develop. Henie Onstad has Sandberg works on mortgage from the Norwegian National Museum and the Tangen Collection, arguably a very powerful assortment of Nordic images on the planet.

The exhibition contains only one {photograph} of the person himself: a self-portrait taken in 2001, by which Sandberg is seen sitting in an armchair in an empty room. He appears to be like like a safety guard. The man you wouldn’t discover.