shashasha

With “Tom Sandberg: Photographs”, Aperture publishes the first major photobook dedicated to the remarkable work by the late Norwegian photographer Tom Sandberg (1953–2014).

From the 1970s until his death in 2014, Tom Sandberg photographed in black-and-white the nuances of life that often go unnoticed: objects, details, moments, absence as well as presence. Whether working with concrete or more abstract subjects, his impeccable compositions always seem to include within them deeper qualities that belong to a world beyond the visible.
While renowned in his home country of Norway, with this monograph Aperture makes the subtle world of Sandberg’s photographs accessible to a wider audience.

The book also includes an interview with Tom Sandberg by arts historian Torunn Liven as well as extensive essays by critic Bob Nickas and writer Pico Iyer (a shorter version of Iyer’s essay can be found at The Guardian).

“You don’t have to observe Sandberg’s work for long before noticing how still lifes, through his eye, are gnarly with texture and rhyming patterns. Yet the human body—in his nudes or portraits of babies—comes to seem just a shape, a cluster of tubes. Naked bodies are the opposite of erotic here.
What all this means is that he moves us to respond to photographs differently from how we usually might, which is why I write of listening as much as as seeing: when I look at his airplane on an icy day, I can feel the slippery ground under my feet and the hard flakes of snow in my face more than I can make out anything visually.”
― from Pico Iyer’s essay “Mysteries in Plain Sight”