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 photographic 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 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 to stand.
Organized in cooporation with the Danish Embassy Great Britain, Lone Britt Christensen, E-mail: lonmol@um.dk