Norwegian Art Photography 1970-2007

Until the early 1970s, art photography was ignored in Norway: photographs were shown neither in the Norwegian National Gallery nor at other institutions devoted to art. Even at art academies, photography as a medium played no role to speak of. How much things have changed is shown by a publication just off the presses from ARNOLDSCHE: Norwegian Art Photography. 1970-2007 – the first survey of four decades of art photography in Norway. \nThe first section of the book shows the influence of international photography on a young generation of Norwegian practitioners: Eline Mugaas’s series `let me be your one-way street’ tangibly reveals traces of Nan Goldin’s intimate, highly personal photographs of 1980s New York subculture. Per Berntsen’s shots of industrial facilities owe a great deal to Bernd and Hilla Becher. There follow a chronological survey of Norwegian art photography under the headings `subjective’, `expressive’, `post-modern’ and `realistic’ and a chapter on the gradual incursion of photography into Norwegian museums, galleries and art academies, culminating in recognition of it as an autonomous art form that cannot be called derivative. \n\nThe lavishly illustrated second section of the book presents and discusses photographs reproduced in large formats arranged according to eight categories, among them `Portraits’, `Staging’, `Identity’, `Natural World’ and `Town’. Artists and works that have had a formative influence on particular schools or movements figure prominently, including Tom Sandberg’s extraordinary black-and-white portraits of such artists as John Cage and Vibeke Tandberg’s self-stagings that play on notions of identity and are reminiscent of Cindy Sherman’s work. An appendix with biographies of all artists shown rounds off the presentation. \n\n100 works by 54 Norwegian photographers provide a dazzling survey of Norwegian art photography from 1970 to the present. An opulently illustrated and informative work, an absolute must for anyone interested in international contemporary photography.