‘Was it a woman who bit off his ear?’: the wild life and serene photography of Tom Sandberg

Norway’s most celebrated photographer made his name with calm, reflective images that sit at odds with his reckless life. Friends and family remember a paradoxical man

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orway has never looked as wet as in the photographs of the late Tom Sandberg. There are shots of drizzle and puddles, of asphalt slick with mizzle. A ripple of water appears to have a hole in it, a figure looms behind a rain-dappled window, a gutter glows after a downpour.

Shot in either bold chiaroscuro or gentle orchestrations of greys, these are pictures with the power to make the everyday seem dreamlike. But they are also uplifting, in a confusing kind of way, like being told to dress for sun even when the clouds are black.

Sandberg, as a new retrospective at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter next to the Oslo fjord makes clear, was not only Norway’s most famous photographer, pivotal in making the medium a serious art form in the Nordic region during the 1980s and 1990s. He was also a paradoxical character: hard-living, erratic, with a propensity for fanning his own myth with his tongue firmly in his cheek – and yet able to produce compositions that are contemplative, calming and uplifting.