Smoliansky / Sandberg
Tom Sandberg, Gunnar Smoliansky

Gunnar Smoliansky (1933-2019) is considered one of the most influential Swedish photographers. He was born in Visby, on the island of Gotland, and devoted himself to photography since the early 1950s. Smoliansky was an independent artist from the 1970s, working almost exclusively with the photographic image. His oeuvre is unique, although conscious of its place in the history of photography. He became acknowledged for his photography through his early independent work and a career that led him to work as a photographer’s assistant and attend night school under Christer Strömholm.

Smoliansky worked exclusively in black and white and always developed his photographs himself. Throughout his career, he transformed his photographed motifs into completed photos in the darkroom. Stockholm is the main focus of Smoliansky’s photographic world, particularly the areas of Södermalm and Saltsjö-Boo, the two parts of the city he lived and worked in for most of his life. From a geographic point of view, the photographs of Gunnar Smoliansky are quite restricted in range. This has not, however, kept him from being regarded as one of the world’s great photographers.

While imbued with a Swedish melancholy, Smoliansky’s work is also part of a broader European photo-documentary tradition. As with the work of André Kertész, his eye distills its subject. Form and line are used economically, while unorthodox camera angles and aerial views render the subject abstract.

Smoliansky’s work is in collections such as Moderna Museet, Nationalmuseum, Hasselbladstiftelsen, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation.

Tom Sandberg (1953-2014) is considered a pioneer within the field of photographic art. He was born in Narvik, Norway, and worked and lived in Oslo.

Working in a signature modulating grayscale, Sandberg spent decades rendering the world according to an exacting vision, training his eye on the shapes and forms of the everyday – dark abstractions of asphalt and sea, the hard edges of an automobile, an ominously curved tunnel, an anonymous figure casting a shadow – to plumb the nature of photographic seeing. His pictures are subtle yet transformative, studies of stillness that radiate mystery. A perfectionist in the darkroom, Sandberg was acutely sensitive to the rich spectrum of black and white, and his handmade prints, at times printed on aluminum and canvas, project a powerful physical presence.

In the early 1970s, Sandberg studied photography at Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham, England, where Thomas Joshua Cooper, Paul Hill, and Minor White were among his teachers. His early work was one of the first acquisitions of photography by The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, and he paved the way for photography within the art world in Norway.

Sandberg’s international recognition peaked with the solo exhibition at MoMA PS1, New York, in 2007. His work is found in a number of museums as well as public and private collections, such as the Moderna Museet, The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, and Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.