On the fulcrum photograph
Tom Sandberg, Untitled, 1997.
This notion of a book of books could also apply to this essay, since it is a text of texts, consisting of quotes from many different essays and interviews that I have conducted throughout the past decade. You could say that the interviews from which I’ve quoted here are my perpetual passages, words that are still on my mind. I like to interview other practitioners, curators and people working within the field to hear their thoughts about the medium. My intention is that it should form a dialogue through these many voices, instead of a fixed statement, offering a wider picture of photographic practices.
After looking through the twenty issues of Objektiv, I notice that the images that speak the loudest to me, and about which I’ve continued to think long after the issue went to print, all stem back to one singular photograph – a sort of fulcrum image. Asked about his work, the late Robert Frank said: ‘When people look at my pictures, I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a poem twice.’ The following images are, for me, the poems you want to read over and again, and it begins with a photograph by Tom Sandberg, taken in the nineties. When I first saw this image, printed on a postcard sent to me by a friend, it seemed to sum up my interest in photography, both as a practitioner and as a writer. The black and white photograph depicts a man walking in the rain, taken through a window. He is blurry, the focus is on the raindrops. Before I knew anything about the photographer, the image simultaneously evoked both loneliness and authority, his oblivion to the rain, something that I later discovered says a lot about Sandberg. He was drawn to the darkness, and this darkness is in the photograph: the longing of being outside. Sandberg worked continuously throughout his life, investigating the world through his camera.
The moment he learned that he had incurable cancer in the late fall of 2013, he started working on what was to become his last exhibition, an early work from Sandberg’s time at Trent Polytechnic in England. A diptych of a boy with a tennis racket, it is an artistic exercise. The boy is practising, and the young photographer Tom Sandberg is practising. Four days before his death, Sandberg made one last adjustment to a photograph of a plane in the clouds. He had a restless curiosity for understanding the world – a world that was black and white in his optics. As he said, some situations just had to be experienced through it.
(…)
When I was looking through the archive, I re-encountered other favourites, and realised that these images were somehow linked to the Sandberg photograph, by Dennis Stock, Astrid Kruse Jensen, Eline Mugaas and Amalia Pica. It’s as if I’m looking for the same image, again and again. These new pictures all evoke similar feelings for me, and somehow they all more or less contain the same message.
Dennis Stock, Venice Beach Rock Festival, 1968, from the book American Cool.
Astrid Kruse Jensen, Disappearing into the Past, 2012.
Eline Mugaas, Go Gray Gracefully, 2013.
Amalia Pica, Sorry for the metaphor #2, 2010. Installation photo from Paris Photo, 2012.
Throughout the issues, I found more works that in some way relate to Sandberg: the wilting flowers in Ingrid Eggen’s work, a self-portrait by Arne Vinnem of him sleeping at Kunstnernes Hus, a collage with a woman in front of a landscape of mountains by Azar Alsharif, the mysterious pink fabric covering a hole in the ground by Lieko Shiga, or the trap car by Deana Lawson. All of these photographs represent longing or nostalgia, but one of the key factors in the images by Sandberg, Stock, Jensen, Mugaas and Pica is the authority of the subjects – something to be inspired by, and strive to have more of. Their strong presence makes me curious, these images become poems, perpetual photographs that I can pin on the wall and look at over and again.
From Perpetual Photographs, Objektiv #21, 2020.