Near and Far: Landscape photographs by Per Bak Jensen
The 12 Star Gallery, Europe House, London
2.5.2012 - 11.5.2012
The good thing about being a landscape photographer is that you have to seek out the landscape. You’ve got to be there, you’ve got to be present.
Per Bak Jensen
The Danish photographer, Per Bak Jensen (born 1949) is often said to be a pioneer in his field. In his indefatigable search for a photographic expression he has created a number of photgraphic series, which have placed him as one of the most important fine art photographers in Scandinavia. For Bak Jensen, who never digitally manipulates his images, it is essential to catch a certain essence of timelessness of the landscape, which, by his own words, set out to capture ‘the being of places’. His photographs frame locations and moods rather than people, and his unique feeling for atmosphere and the milieu is evident.
The exhibition at the 12 Star Gallery, Europe House, London, is an informal survey of a number of Bak Jensen’s most notable large-scale landscape images of Denmark, Greenland and Northern Germany, curated by Barry Phipps, University of Cambridge. The photographs may be regarded as pauses between things and events, with the quietness of spaces separating moments, yet are still moments themselves. As Barry Phipps suggests:
If you speak with Per Bak Jensen you learn that his fundamental aim is to capture ‘the being of the places’. Yet, there is more to retrieve from Bak Jensen’s photographs than what the subject of those images alone can bear. They appear t stand outside of everyday time. For the time of these photographs is a long breath where the movement of birds and planes are veiled out, and the sound of the waves on the water have been frozen by the camera’s shutter speed. Yet, the subjects of his large pictures, despite their mute immobility, still feel alive.
Per Bak Jensen was until recently an associate professor at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and through his unique photographic working methods he has inspired many young Scandinavian artists. His work is represented in many public collections worldwide, such as MOMA, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York and Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris. Barry Phipps is a Fellow and Curator of Works of Art at Churchill College, University of Cambridge and has previously curated a number of highly acclaimed exhibitions, including Lines of Enquiry and Beyond Measure at Kettle’s Yard Gallery, Cambridge. He continues to lecture and write on contemporary art and inter-disciplinary related topics. The exhibition is part of the cultural activities during the Danish EU Presidency. The 12 Star Gallery is dedicated to showing work which celebrates the creativity and cultural diversity that is the hallmark of the European Union.
For information or press images please contact: Lone Britt Christensen, Cultural Attaché, Embassy of Denmark. Email: lonmol@um.dk
The exhibition will be touring to Churchill College, Cambridge, 16 May – 21 June 2012.
