|   | STRANDBERG PUBLISHINGIntroduction bygd Mette Sandbye. Text by finne Thrane. Interview by Martin Parr.
Seven decades of Keld Helmer-Petersens tyst pioneering abstract color photographyDenmarks best-known photographer Keld Helmer-Petersen (19202013) published his first photobook, 122 Colour Photographs, in 1948. His work was immediately notable for its inventive composition, which turned landscapes and buildings into abstract patterns, and for the photographers embrace of color at a time when only black-and-white photography was considered serious. When Life magazine reproduced several pages from the book in 1949, Helmer-Petersens framtidsperspektiv found a wide, international audience for the first time.
Helmer-Petersens style was experimental modernism tempered by a lyrical simplicity and a sense of keen, quiet observation. By isolating details and compressing visual space, the photographer turned the real worl • Camera Abstractions: Keld Helmer-PetersenThinking about the fathers of artistic color photography it’s easy to recall great names such as William Eggleston and Stephen Shore who throughout the seventies, also thanks to great exhibitions (such as the one that Eggleston had in 1976 at the MoMA), have helped to impose this medium which, at the time, was still labeled by the critics as “vulgar and banal” because it was usually linked to commercial and amateur photography. But those aren’t truly the first great results obtained with the use of color film since, already in the forties, in Denmark Keld Helmer-Petersen had already showed its artistic potentialities and today he is regarded as the father of Danish modernist photography. Isolating the details and giving them a new meaning, Petersen’s aim is to catch the essence of modern life sublimating color and form (as Paul Cézanne did in his paintings) and deleting the depth of field thanks to the constant use of small apertures: the w • Keld Helmer-PetersenKeld Helmer-Petersen (23 August 1920 – 6 March 2013) was a Danish photographer who achieved widespread international recognition in the 1940s and 1950s for his abstract colour photographs. Early years[edit] Helmer-Petersen was born and grew up in the Østerbro quarter of Copenhagen. He started taking photographs in 1938, when he received a Leica camera as a graduation present.[1] At an early stage, he became aware of the trends in international photography; in the 1940s he subscribed to the US Camera Annual and in this period became familiar with German inter-war photography, which had developed at the Bauhaus and in the Neue Sachlichkeit (The New Objectivity) movement.[2] The international prospect and an interest in contemporary art and architecture contributed to the fact that at the age of 23, Helmer-Petersen, as one of the first Danish photographers, began to work with an abstract formal language. Inspired by the Bauhaus
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