Tom Sandberg: Ear-Biting Incident & Serene Wildlife Photography

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Norway has never looked as wet as in the photographs of the late tom Sandberg.There are shots of drizzle and puddles, of asphalt slick with mizzle. A ripple of water appears to have a hole in it,a figure looms behind a rain-dappled window,a gutter glows after a downpour.

Shot in either bold chiaroscuro or gentle orchestrations of greys, these are pictures with the power to make the everyday seem dreamlike. But they are also uplifting, in a confusing kind of way, like being told to dress for sun even when the clouds are black.

‘He loved myth-making’ … Untitled, 1990s, by Tom Sandberg. Photograph: Tom Sandberg

Sandberg, as a new retrospective at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter next to the Oslo fjord makes clear, was not only Norway’s most famous photographer, pivotal in making the medium a serious art form in the Nordic region during the 1980s and 1990s. He was also a paradoxical character: hard-living, erratic, with a propensity for fanning his own myth with his tongue firmly in his cheek – and yet able to produce compositions that are contemplative, calming and uplifting.

John Cage, 1985, by Tom Sandberg. Photograph: Tom Sandberg

Covering four decades, from student work taken in the mid-1970s through to pictures made shortly before his death in 2014, Tom Sandberg: Vibrant world is the first major Sandberg show as his death aged 60. The setting is apt: Sandberg was once the in-house photographer at Henie Onstad, capturing art happenings in its galleries and making closely cropped, vastly enlarged, monochrome portraits of visiting dignitaries, including the composer John Cage and the artist Christo. they are topographical in their

# Tom Sandberg: The Norwegian Photographer Who Dreamt in Black and White

“He was a wild soul,” says Jan Erik Andenæs, speaking of the Norwegian photographer Tom Sandberg. “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, Andenæs adds. “he would periodically go on benders.”


sandberg confided in Andenæs that “if it weren’t for photography he’d probably go to the hounds.” Rumours followed him. “If you look at his ear in portraits, part of it is indeed 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,” Andenæs recounts. “he would tell interviewers that he dreamt in black and white.”

Despite a methodology, poetic sensibility, and minimalist subject matter that evokes a modernist loner – his photographs frequently depict solitary figures with their backs to the camera – Sandberg was far from a recluse. “He was seen by everyone he drew into his orbit,” Andenæs notes. “And he had a drive and intuition that rumbled on like a lorry without brakes.”

His human subjects are, in essence, studies of form. One photograph captures a man seemingly dancing with his own shadow.In the early 2000s, he photographed his young daughter, Marie, as a blur of blonde hair. He created visual sketches of people.