ENTRY DESCRIPTION
Sea and air appear immutable and ordinary in their essence, even though they are essential to all life on earth. In art, the nature of the elements can also appear as recognizable, and the experiences the viewer has from different landscapes are included in the encounter with a landscape image. In this meeting, experiences and established knowledge can both be confirmed and problematized.

In my photographic work, landscapes and the forces of nature that influence them are explored. With that, I try to uncover something more than the purely optical visual: to capture the feeling of being present in these landscapes, by creating impressions in, with or through movement and time.

Walter Benjamin claimed that photography was in a special position when it came to reproducing the original and authentic. The photograph could, in fact, "by means of methods such as magnification or fast exposure, retain images which simply evade natural optics." The ability to see the invisible through photographic technology has resulted in a unique interplay between human and mechanical optics - an interplay dominating several scientific fields.

Even if sea levels rise, the horizon will continue to look the same as it always has. Time will continue to characterize our landscapes, and the experience of being a given place will thus also change over time. This, even though man's natural sensory apparatus is too little fine-tuned to register that it happens. Landscape photography can thus be understood as a communicating marker for changes in nature. And the interplay between human and mechanical optics makes visible not only these changes purely referentially, but also human‘s shortcomings and its consequences.

AUTHOR
Ole Brodersen is a Norwegian art photographer who works with staged landscapes. His most known series “Trespassing” explores encounters between man and nature, and is produced in the island society Lyngør where he grew up as 12th generation. He is strongly affiliated to this place and the maritime elements here dominate his motifs. His father is a sail maker, his grandfather was a sailor and he himself used to row to school.

The forces of nature are natural phenomena always present in a landscape, beyond human control. Ole Brodersen‘s work is dedicated to unveiling this presence.

Brodersen‘s photographs was last shown at the Soprafina Gallery in Boston; recommended by the Boston Globe. The New Yorker and Harper‘s Magazine wrote about his last show in NYC. His works has been acquired by private and public collections in Norway, Sweden, Serbia, Malawi, the United Arab Emirates and USA.

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