Bio

Ole Brodersen's (41) photographic work focuses on landscapes and the forces of nature that affect them. With that, he tries to reveal 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. Brodersen lives and works in Lyngør, a car free island society off the Norwegian southern coast, where he has grown up as the twelfth generation in his family. Ole's father is a sailmaker, his grandfather was a sailor, and as a child Ole rowed to school. Everyday life in Lyngør is closely connected with and influenced by the sea, which provides substance and background for his pictorial experiments. Time is abstract and - in itself - not something one can see. Brodersen points the camera at nature and lets the forces of nature appear, through shifting horizon lines, overlapping cloud formations and layered wave patterns. Through long exposures, or by gathering several exposures from the same subject in one image, the time and movements that activate the landscape are fixed in his photographic work. The intention is to convey an experience of being somewhere, and sense what surrounds one. To approach this, Ole Brodersen gives up some of the control over the final result. Brodersen‘s recent experiments include high ISO small format (35mm) film and a waterproof camera – invented by the French marine biologist Jacques-Yves Cousteau. The result is grainy images that bring the viewer close to the forces of the sea. Aesthetically, these images refer to pointillism, which is based on the idea that the spectator's sense of sight does not perceive the dots separately, but automatically puts them together into a whole. In this way, the mechanics of the human sense of sight also play a decisive role in how the landscape and the forces in this are finally understood. When Brodersen's exhibition Time by the sea opened in 2021, it was Dag O. Hessen, professor in biology and writer, who gave the opening speech. In it, the environment and climate debate were a common thread, and Hessen pointed out that it is the sea we will live off after our short oil intermezzo is over. In order to create greater awareness and engagement around the debates, he believed that the role of art is essential: «Must art be legitimized by its usefulness? I do not mean that, in the same way that research does not have to legitimize itself by its immediate and concrete utility value. But still, it is clear that art and science can be united, perhaps should also be united, now that our future is at stake. Research may involve one half of the brain, but art is needed to engage the other. Man is a visual animal, and the great environmental battles can only be won by engaging both halves of the brain. " Ole Brodersen (41) has studied art direction and has been the assistant to the art photographer Dag Alveng (represented by MOMA and the Metropolitan Museum in New York) Brodersen was recently acquired by the Norwegian National Museum of Photography (Preus Museum), and his works was last seen abroad in Milan. Ole's work has also been shown in Boston, Paris, New York, Los Angeles and Vancouver. The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, D2 and Dagbladet Magasinet have written about his work. Ole Brodersen is represented by Shoot Gallery in Oslo and Muriel Guepin in New York. In this old herring saltery, moved to Lyngør in 1890, Brodersen has built one of Norway's most advanced darkrooms. Here he produces large silver gelatin fibre/baryta prints in widths of up to 170cm. These are wet-mounted on aluminum and are exhibited in frames from a local boat builder.