The Guardian: " ‘Was it a woman who bit off his ear?’: the wild life and serene photography of Tom Sandberg
Norway’s most celebrated photographer made his name with calm, reflective images that sit at odds with his reckless life. Friends and family remember a paradoxical man".
"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.
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 since 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 scrutiny of pitted, sandpapery skin.
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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.
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He was born in 1953 in the town of Narvik on the coast of northern Norway. The family subsequently moved to Oslo, where Tom’s father worked as a photojournalist. “His father took him to the darkroom for the first time and exposed Tom’s hand on the photo paper. He said he was immediately smitten by that alchemical magic and never looked back,” recalls the art historian Torunn Liven, a long-time friend and trustee of the Tom Sandberg Foundation.
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Sandberg considered the darkroom process, in which he experimented with materials and retouching, to be a pivotal part of image-making. And, as his practice progressed, his prints became larger, almost cinematic. A noirish interior of the lounge at Oslo’s Gardermoen airport could be a film still from a Wim Wenders feature."
Text by Christian House, The Guardian
Tom Sandberg (1953–2014) was one of Norway's most significant and prolific art photographers whose work also gained international recognition. He is known for his atmospheric black-and-white photographs and his finely tuned modulation of shades of grey in the range between pitch black and pure white. This year marks 40 years since his first solo exhibition at a museum, held at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in 1985.
The exhibition, which is presented in the museum’s largest gallery – Storsalen – presents more than 100 works, in addition to material from the museum's own archive. The selection includes several iconic works from the peak of Sandberg’s career, while also highlighting lesser-known works characterised by experimentation with format and technique.
The exhibition runs until 1st March 2026.
Installation view from Tom Sandberg: Vibrant World, 2025–2026, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter. Photo: Christian Tunge / Henie Onstad Kunstsenter
