Tom Sandberg

The Nordic World Ski Championship, which takes place over the course of 12 days in Holemnkollen, Norway, is the largest skiing event of the year. In 2011 renowned Norwegian photographer Tom Sandberg (born 1953) documented the proceedings in black and white and color, in his inimitably majestic style. Through Sandberg’s lens, events both off and on the arenas are lifted out of the ordinary. Cross-country skiers look like ballet dancers in the snow; ski jumpers seem to disappear into the crowds; One of Norway’s most important modernist photographers, Sandberg had his first major U.S. show at MoMA PS1 in New York in 2007. Using soft color tones and isolation in the picture frame, Sandberg imbues ordinarily unremarkable objects and scenes with a sense of wonder and mystery.

Tom Sandberg’s photographs made a splash at New York’s P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in February of 2007. Though previously almost unknown to the American public, Sandberg, born in 1953, has quietly produced, over three decades, a superb oeuvre of austere, large-scale black-and-white photography. Focusing on a single object or person in each photograph, and steeping them in a murky, wintry light, Sandberg draws out soft tones and moody atmospheres from his subjects to create a pervasive complicity between them and the surrounding landscape. But he is an exacting image-maker too, and an involved one, insisting as he does on clarity amid darkness, and on the viewer’s emotional approach to his images. Co-designed by the artist, this beautifully-made catalogue--with essays by visionary curator Bob Nickas and P.S. 1’s Alanna Heiss--serves as an important primer on one of Norway's foremost practitioners of photography.