SUSANNE WINTERLING & SARA R. YAZDANI

A conversation between Sara R.Yazdani and Susanne M.Winterling 

Susanne M Winterling, Solidarity, 2014. Installation, courtesy the artist

Sara R. Yazdani  In 2011, Rom for Kunst organised an exhibition of Tom Sandberg’s large-format photographs, hung over the entrance of Oslo Central Station. Black- and-white images denote an entire era of modern analogue photography, both its poetic and its documentary aesthetics. I remember one image from this public project in particular: the child bending and placing her head on the ground. It is present yet remote at the same time. 

Susanne M. Winterling What struck me was the classical physicality of these images and also the way that they are very ephemeral. But another reason to use Sandberg’s work as a starting point for our conversation is how in that setting, in the middle of life, they take on a near animated quality. The train station is such a time place and seemed such a strong materialisation of the moments captured in Sandberg’s images. This time in this space matters in a station, so one can get very close to the singularity of those moments. When we look at the images, we zoom in and pause them against this background of the busy station. We’re aware of the medium, the large photograph, because it’s immersed in this context, yet stands out in its singularity. 

SY  Sandberg’s legacy is profound. The medium of photography has, however, radically changed since he made these works. Media technologies change, art and human perception always develop alongside such changes. 

Tom Sandberg, Untitled, 1996

SW  Exactly, and another time thing: today, to use black and white photography is to emphasise its materiality; for example, used directly on the wall and blown up large scale it emphasises the reality of how we see images on an HD display. The acceleration of ways of perceiving, the constant scrolling, disposing and consuming of images on screens, not only contrasts with the sentiments conveyed by large- scale black-and-white photos, but also the use of material as content. This recalls the writer and feminist theorist Karen Barad, who, drawing from quantum physics and feminist theory, takes a different approach to the nature of matter that can fundamentally shake our understanding of the line between nature and culture. 

Wolfgang Tillmans, Outer Ear, unframed inkjet print, 200 x 135 cm, 2012, courtesy Maureen Paley.

SY  It also reminds me of Wolfgang Tillmans’ words in an interview with Beatriz Ruf, published in his artist’s book Neue Welt (2010): Everything is matter continually renewing itself and transforming from one aggregate state into another. His words emphasise that everything on the planet is matter – humans, plants and technologies – and that these matters are constantly transforming and changing one another. This hypothesis seems to linger throughout Tillmans’ body of work and invites an exploration of the vitality and formation of life and technologies. Meanwhile, it emphasises tendencies in contemporary art where visual images are assemblages. What if, for once, we did not see images as representations or semantic bearers? What if we started with materiality, media and technologies – the materiality of human bodies, nature, objects and machines – in our understanding of contemporary images? 

SW  The physicality of an image in Tillmans’ photos is often connected to a closeness and intimacy in the tradition of 1990s photography, and talks about the human body and desire. Other images that were really vivid for me when I was invited to his London studio as a young artist are all the still lifes he made, mini stages with light, fruits and food as well as remnants of certain night activities. On top of their intimacy and traces of a social community, there is a life, a kind of animation. For a lot of artists of my generation working with the camera, his work has been a strong influence. 

SY In What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, W.J.T. Mitchell radically underlines the fact that pictures are assemblages of images, objects and media. Whereas image refers to the figure or motif that appears in a medium, ‘object’ refers to the ‘material support in or on which an image appears, or the material thing that an image refers to or brings into view’.  The third component of the assemblage, ‘media’, refers to the ‘set of material practices that brings an image together with an object to produce a picture’. Pictures, as he notes, are ‘understood as complex assemblages of virtual, material, and symbolic elements’. This complexity arguably lingers throughout new media art. Pictures, photographs or images can no longer be interpreted as pure symbolic representations or mirrors of the world. They’re embodied systems, operating in and through larger technical, political, economical and societal systems and not only surfaces signifying language. As Mitchell stresses, pictures have ‘lives and loves’. We thus need to move beyond the idea of images as world mirrors. Or do we? 

SW  They live and love, and include other sensual aspects not only relying on language. The idea of the mirror seems more interesting as a screen. And nearly all the screens we face are reflective like a mirror. The screen has a life of its own. The shiny surfaces and screens that conquer so much of our immediate surroundings in daily life are often more like dark holes, like a Pandora’s box. 

SY  In philosophy, feminism and art, the theoretical debates are more and more concerned with materialism. These discussions are ontological as well as epistemological and are interested in non-human forces, human perception, matter and objects as meaning-makers. As the professor and writer Jane Bennett has asked: ‘Why advocate the vitality of matter?’ Her answer is fruitful: ‘Because my hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies.’  These nonhuman powers thus need to be taken into consideration.They affect how we feel, taste and experience the world. And they most certainly circulate within new-media art. Here, material isn’t a physical object, a thin piece of paper, a medium, a photograph, or a colour; it’s the substance of material relations. In short, it’s a sphere, surface or mechanism where social relations are manifested. This mechanism, or mechanisms, seems crucial when entering the world of pictures, not only contemporary ones, but also earlier works. Sandberg’s large photographs unambiguously do that. 

But what is the social life of photography? What is a social surface? And how to they interrelate with one another? As the social is always a process occurring between humans and technologies, the distinction is possibly non-existent. These new social realities manifest themselves in our aesthetic relations with technologies and materials. These works are rendering new forms of subjectivity and have the ability to construct and question not only the materiality of the art, but also the existence of life and bodies. 

Susanne M. Winterling.

Your work My Physicality (2014) emphasises these forms of life explicitly. Human perception becomes key. It’s where the viewing subject enters the agency of the work, and where the work enters the subject.This agency is thus always social, always alive and operates in and through human and non-human objects. In your work, it appears that these social processes take place on the surface. Surface is here not superficial, empty or flat; it refers to the agency of media and technologies. For new media tech- nologies generate new forms of materiality. And it’s inside and through them that materials are transformed and embodied. The bodily dimension becomes central. Skin, tactility and surface are also emphasised in A Skin Too Thin (Light to Pink, No. 1) (2012). Skin is replaced with photo paper, colour, light and signals. Are the materials replaced by skin? It appears they meet somewhere halfway. 

SW  Skin colour: film and photography have always struggled to capture it. Also, it’s still a crucial element in the way lenses and recording devices are developed. Skin colour is a very peculiar phenomenon and thus tricky to work with in any medium. From the inside to the outside, it’s how we relate to the world in the first and most immediate sense. We’re covered with clothes, of course, but that’s also why conductive fabrics will become interesting tools and materials. With conductive fabric or paint we connect to interfaces; one might even claim we can become interface. The first materialisation of this in my work is photographic paper and the way it absorbs and gets absorbed and changed in the exposure process. That process is interesting to me on one side because it’s never the same and constantly moves and stays alive, always a singularity, but very visually ephemeral and super-sensitive. Its physicality is expressed in different shades of blue or pinkless than we find in biology, but definitely similar or comparable to biodiversity. 

SY You’ve preferred to use the term ‘physicality’: physicality of the image; physicality of the material; physicality of the body. What does that mean to you? When and where does physicality happen in photography, and objects of art in general? The term reminds me of Barad, whom I know has been an inspiration to you. 

SW Matter and materiality denote a wider range than ‘physicality’. I insist on what can be extracted from historical materialism, or other materialist specifications – as a political fact as well as an aesthetic one. In my work I often refer to film and film history as a material, just as the donkey in Robert Bresson’s film Au Hasard Balthazar (1996) is already an animal with a history. But to speak about the ‘physicality’ of an image is more to describe and investigate its qualities sensually: how is this happening? How is it talking? The past as well as the future influence us – for example, our perception of a piece of photo paper in an exhibition that has been developing since the opening and is constantly, according to the rhythm of the space and its architecture, exposed to light. 

Barad would say: ‘the larger apparatus in its particular material configuration enacts particular cuts that materialize determinately bounded and propertied ‘things’ together with their ‘agencies of observation’. A movement, a touch might evolve from light; light might also be matter. As an artist, the entanglement of this is very sexy and it allows for a super complexity even if it’s a very simple effect. We can be touched in many ways. 

SY  There’s an aesthetic interrelation between the material support of the work and its tactility. New materialism is also about how media and technologies process, transform and transmit information. It permits one to explore material that isn’t necessarily seen, directly ‘felt’ or visible. Hence, the digital. For how can one touch, see or feel digital codes, information and signals? Does its invisibility and lack of matter mean that it has vitality? These concerns recall the idea that electronic signals al- ways are embodied. 

SW  Electronic signals and all embodied waves also refer to the fact that all perceiving is embodied. This is one reason why I like working with 3D animation: you can feel the body being carved into space. Like marble as a material, the grid and wireframe structure allows one to play with touch and the possibility of closeness in a physical way. Surfaces like skin become crucial for osmosis; that’s where waves permeate. Like the nature/culture divide, I think the digital/analogue divide has to be changed and redrawn or even dropped. 

Wolfgang Tillmans, Central Nervous System, inkjet print on paper mounted on aluminium in artist’s frame, frame: 97 x 82 cm, 2013, courtesy Maureen Paley.

SY  What has influenced my questions in this regard is Tillmans’ exhibition Central Nervous System at Maureen Paley’s gallery in 2013. The subjects are in one sense becoming what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari referred to as a ‘body without organs’. Meanwhile, via the technological possibilities of both the digital camera and the inkjet print, the surface of the bodies in the images has become beyond or ‘larger’ than human biological skin. It touches you, and itself, almost like it’s living its own life, beyond the biological. It has become post-human. The touch is very mechanical, yet very poetic. In the gallery space the images become surfaces that create an intimate space where human perception and the body become essential. 

One could therefore argue that the materiality of these pictorial surfaces constructs new social realities. According to Barad, matter and meaning can’t be alienated. And science can’t be ignored here. This was explicit in your latest show Drift at Gallery Parrotta, Stuttgart, earlier this year, where hands, touch, immersion and technology drift through the gallery space. As Barad notes, ‘Touch is the primary concern of physics.’ This relates to the senses, how humans as well as particles sense and experience one another. As material forces, art objects also drift in social life and subjectivity. Reality and being become phenomena on the surface and its materialization of ourselves, as in Tillmans’ Central Nervous System and Sandberg’s enlarged pictures in Oslo. Here, photography is a medium whose agency empowers its meaning, movement and vitality. It’s an object that can reinforce and generate events and causality. But to what extent? 

TOM SANDBERG

Tom Sandberg, Untitled. Installation view, Nils Stærk. Photo: Malle Madsen.

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.

By Morten Andenæs 

I think about this line from Djuna Barnes’s most famous novel,Nightwood, on a plane above the clouds, on my way to see an exhibition of Tom Sandberg’s vintage prints at Nils Stærk Gallery in Copenhagen. An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties seems to sum up much of what happens when I see one of his photographs, whether in my mind’s eye or in real life. The phrase describes the space of the image not as certainty, but as an experience situated beyond the all-too-familiar space of uncertainty—a huge distinction.

I am seated next to the wing. Every time my eye strays beyond the reinforced window that separates me from death, I see, for all intents and purposes, any number of Sandberg photographs; the jet engines as devouring faces or hollow eyes, the wing at an angle to the horizon. The plane changes course and the layers of accumulated clouds stretch toward a horizon that seems to stay at the same distance, no matter how fast, or in which direction, we travel.

Tom Sandberg, Untitled. Installation view, Nils Stærk. Photo: Malle Madsen.

Sandberg’s photographs have always implicated me as their viewer. Their gravitational force is like that of a black hole. They draw me in and leave me breathless, doomed, for example, never to see the horizon again. I’ve always liked that feeling, though, have craved to be like the young boy standing on a precipice in one the photographs from his 2007 exhibition at MOMA PS1. To come upon these photographs is to risk disintegration, to risk heartbreak and loneliness. They respond intuitively to a deep-seated, desperate yearning in me to be seen.

I am convinced that Sandberg had an innate understanding of this mechanism. His photographs could act the part of a benevolent mother, her arms extended. Each time they cast their attention upon us, it was as if we were seen for the first time. But, just as quickly, a cloud could pass up above, covering the sun that shone just moments earlier and leaving us stranded in the shadows, turned away absolutely by a dismissive father.

Photographs obviously do not see us. They do not reject or affirm. But some of us, myself included, are prone to projecting these characteristics on to them. The body of work that Sandberg has left behind probes these needs that nag at so many of us.

Eleven thousand feet above ground, travelling at about five hundred kilometres an hour, and with an outside temperature of -55℃ degrees, I glance briefly at my phone, which displays the press photographs sent to me by the gallery. I ask the attendant for a coffee; her voice is hushed, gentle. The plane makes a pleasant buzzing sound even though I am seated just a few metres away from its engines. For the most part, the possibility of utter destruction and chaos eludes me as I succumb to the knowledge and illusion that flying is the safest form of transport. I have always thought of Sandberg’s photographs as sublime. They are seemingly unmediated; we enter their illusory space, become participants, and risk something when we agree to let ourselves be touched by them. But looking at these pictures on my phone, I had an inkling that what I would see upon landing was something more intimate, having more to do with his presence than mine. They were beautiful, not sublime.

We need that. Beauty, that is. There is safety in it.

Beauty invites us to look, to scour the scene, to enjoy. One thing I have learned over the last five years is that not everything has to be heart-wrenching and lead to asphyxiation and destruction. Sometimes beauty is simply about presence, about being in the world and not being overwhelmed, not being constantly afraid of losing one’s grip. Because if our condition is to always be face-to-face with oblivion, it is also to brush up against presence.

Something and nothing coexist. Love is the precondition for heartbreak. Disintegration is contingent upon wholeness. Separation can only follow a sustained period of unity.

Tom Sandberg, Untitled. Installation view, Nils Stærk. Photo: Malle Madsen.

As far as Sandberg exhibitions go, this is one of the most stringent, sober, and understated ones I’ve seen. It contains the familiar cloudscapes and cloud formations. There are women in various guises and silhouettes filtered through layers of what was once transparent material that over time has become opaque and dirty. There is the well-known image of an out-of-focus face, tightly cropped to reveal only what appears to be sunglasses, and, hung in a sequence by themselves on one wall, four photographs of lingering smoke, as if someone just left the scene.

This is no museum show; it is a no-nonsense exhibition presented at a renowned private gallery. Though the artist needs little introduction in Norway, his work is still being discovered by an international audience—and exhibitions like this one are a step in the right direction. Though some of the work was familiar to me, other pictures I had never seen before; the exhibition had me longing for more. I take that to be a good thing and hope this show is the first of many in which the artist’s playful, lonely, small rarities and asides add to the impressive collection of iconic, autonomous imagery many of us know and revere.

Today there is little photographic work with a nerve similar to Sandberg’s. He came of age in the aftermath of a generation that believed in the sanctimony of the black-and-white photograph and entered the field at the same time as the Pictures generation. Sandberg’s work doesn’t fit into either of these categories and is perhaps more at home alongside music than anywhere else. The complexity of Arvo Pärt’s Fratres (1977) and the brooding melancholy of Henryck Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 (commonly known as the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, also 1977)spring to mind, as does the reverent beauty of Talk Talk’s 1988 record Spirit of Eden and Nick Cave’s devilish 2003 album Nocturama. Or, given its propensity for existential anguish and bliss, it seems natural to mention Sandberg’s work in the same breath as filmmakers Terence Malick and Krzysztof Kieślowski, to name just a few.

Unlike most of the Sandberg photographs displayed in the last fifteen years, the prints in this exhibition were made by his hand, not by one of his trusted printers in Oslo or Paris. They were made in the dank darkroom in the basement of his house at Ekely in Oslo, an artist colony situated on Edvard Munch’s former estate. I remember that darkroom, poorly ventilated and situated next to a cellar he once dreamt of turning into a music studio. Thwarted dreams, indeed.

I get on a plane to visit another city in order to see sixteen small black-and-white photographs for the same reason I then hop on a bus and go directly to Statens Museum for Kunst to see the paintings of Wilhelm Hammershøi, which I have ever only experienced in books. I want the face-to-face experience with that particular aura that the authentic object emanates. In the case of a photograph, that particular object is the vintage print.

Tom Sandberg, Untitled. Installation view, Nils Stærk. Photo: Malle Madsen.

Photography is mediation, and in these oh-so-mediated lives of ours it could be argued that the attempt to force us to see pictures “firsthand” is a cynical ploy to make the photograph more of an authentic object than it is. Yet there is something to be said for seeing something for oneself, for standing face-to-face with the physical image and the potential smell of fixer. In a world where we watch movies made with million-dollar technology in low resolution on our phones, there is something to be said for getting as close as possible, to not accept the copy, the file, or the screen simply because it’s good enough. Something does get lost on the way, in translation. The tonality of a daguerreotype seen up close is vastly different than that of a JPEG endlessly compressed.

I turn to some of the skyscapes and photographs of clouds. I lose myself in the minutiae, in the subtle and ever-expanding range of grays Sandberg was able to reproduce. Rather than being transported to the scene in question, weightless and disembodied, as happened often with his large-format prints, these small pictures bring me into his world, to that damp basement of his where the music blared and his need to make these things was so pressing. Why keep re-presenting the world in order to look at it anew? Why call forth these images (in Norwegian, the words for the chemical process of developing a picture are frem kalle)? Why tease these pictures out from the depths of reality?

I look across the room again to the four pictures hung side-by-side, neatly matted and framed, as is everything in this exhibition. Four photographs of smoke caught in mid-air. In one, the smoke seems to come up at us from below, like a hand asking us to take it in ours. Four photographs of cigarette smoke curling up in front of us, frozen against that infinite dark grey that lingers at the back of so many of his photographs, serving as a state of uncertainty, a reminder that one day, at some point, all will be black … just not today, here, now.

Tom Sandberg, Untitled. Installation view, Nils Stærk. Photo: Malle Madsen.

There must be hundreds, even thousands of online forums in which people upload, compare, and comment on photographs of smoke. The subject lends itself to being photographed; its ephemeral nature and constant shape-shifting, like that of clouds, ensures there can never be two photographs quite the same. An easy subject, then, and surely one that many capital-A artists would avoid, or at any rate bolster with theory, because it seems too simple, too seductive.

Luckily for us, Tom was never afraid of brushing up against what others would consider cliché. Without explicitly stating it, his works are testament to a conviction that whatever trope he was working with at the moment—be it a wilting flower, smoke, clouds, or the female body—would never be photographed and interpreted in exactly the way he did because there was no one quite like him. It’s a simple fact, too easily overlooked.

There’s an obvious connection between the smoke and the clouds and the ways in which both relate to the fleeting nature of the moments we associate with so many of his works. And yet, more than anything, those four simple photographs on display at Nils Stærk whisper to me about presence. Many who read this will know the Sandberg photograph of smoke seemingly emanating from what appears to be a book or folder. It’s a large, iconic image that lends itself to many interpretations, uses, and experiences. But at Nils Stærk all we get is the smoke and that dense, ash-like background. I imagine the artist sitting there, seeing his own smoke caught in the light. Inhale, exhale. Photographs about presence and breath, about pleasure, the kind that hurts just slightly, and self-preservation and perpetuation. They are simple, born out of a curiosity to see what happens when the world is photographed (to quote Garry Winogrand), what kind of meanings are generated, which kind of experiences. Seen in conjunction with the views from the airplane, with the silhouettes or the black puddles for which he is famed, the pictures of smoke offer a burgeoning grammar of loneliness. It is a solitary act, this kind of smoking, something I’ve thought about every day since I quit four years ago. The pleasure taken in the way the smoke curls around, envelops the smoker and then fades away. I can’t help but think as well that these are pictures about a certain kind of helplessness, the helplessness of someone who even in tiny moments cannot lay the camera down and just be, there, here, content. This serves also to make them about yearning, about that unidentifiable itch in the minds of self-conscious beings. The smoke beckons us, whispers to us to behold it before it’s gone, again. Recently, writing in another context about a painting that struck me as photographic, I wondered if photography could ever be touching in the literal sense that painting can be. Perhaps here, with the artist’s breath made visible by the smoke that once filled his lungs, I have the beginning of an answer.

Tom Sandberg, Untitled. Installation view, Nils Stærk. Photo: Malle Madsen.

Breath as presence. The thought prods me to look again at the other works on display. I take in the female figures. One is caught through the mesh of a curtain. Her breasts and mouth, her upward thrust and silent scream, has me wondering if it is pain or relief she’s experiencing, or if she simply wishes to be held. Next to her the outline of a woman’s nose is seen from the seat behind her on the plane, a plaster cast of the everyday. Next to her again, hidden by the curtain of her bangs, is what I must assume is a face, her nose barely visible. I long for her to look up and reciprocate, but this is a photograph, still, frozen, until one day it simply fades from view.

I pass by the clouds once again. I draw near, take in details the JPEG files on my computer surely miss. I let me eyes caress the chemically produced surfaces, the images existing, lodged and fixed inside the paper’s emulsion, developed by the magical chemical process. Reality quoted, as John Berger would have it, for several lifetimes. In front of one of these pictures of clouds small dark spots reveal themselves to me and have me standing face-to-face with him, the artist. Poorly retouched spots, intended to eradicate the blanks created by dust from the artist’s surroundings and trick the eye into an experience of seamlessness, become instead small cries for attention, for help. I think of something a friend of mine said recently, about a printed text that contained a few spelling errors, that its imperfections were charming, how they created an experience removed from the machinery of rationalism. I wasn’t quite sure then, but here, now, I find myself in tacit agreement.

As I hurry through the non-space of the departure hall, the site of many Sandberg photographs, I think about how many situations, objects, and gestures he lifted from our surroundings and transformed into events. When I am finally seated in 8A, I turn to my left and look out the window. My fingers trace the oval outline of the windowsill. I notice the small crystals attached to the outside pane. Condensation builds up between the inner and outer glass, making whatever is outside the window blurry. I envision the photograph Tom made that a close friend recently reminded me of. It is her favourite photograph by him, she said; it features  the outline of a person seen looming through just such drops of water, seen from what could be the inside of a car.

In his sublime, iconic photographs, Sandberg removed himself sufficiently, handing the scene over to us so as to allow our complete identification with it and to assume his point of view. But there, in the prints at Nils Stærk, the artist is present in the small retouched bits, in the smoke that for a few moments took residence in his lungs. He is there, whispering to us from beyond the veil, beyond the darkroom, and beyond petty mortal existence. In those small, unassuming prints there is something self-involved, therapeutic, sketch-like, and nervous, something playful and wistful, something simple, motivated perhaps by nothing more than the need to keep going, to somehow see oneself reflected in, or part of, the world out there.

Tom Sandberg, Untitled. Installation view, Nils Stærk. Photo: Malle Madsen.

TOM SANDBERG

Untitled, 2008, Tom Sandberg

The curator of the show Tom Sandberg: Photographs 1989-2006, Bob Nickas on his collaboration with Tom Sandberg.

Nina Strand After your first visit at Ekely in Tom's studio, set up by Marta Kuzma and OCA as a last-minute meeting, having encountered his big, haunting prints, you knew immediately that you wanted to make a show with him. What was it in his work that intrigued you?

Bob Nickas Some of them were, as you say, haunting. The images stayed with me after I had left, and of course I thought of his pictures of planes and clouds and the sky on the flight back to New York. It was clear that this was an artist who saw the world in a way that emphasized its fragility and ours. One image in particular hit me very strongly, as I'm sure it does for most viewers—the enormous egg-like baby's head on the beach. That's a photo of his daughter when she was very young. You only need to see that photo once and you don't forget it, and that first time you feel as if you already knew it from before. Not many artists can create images with an instant recognition, and that linger for a long time. It could be a scene from a movie, where everything is still and then suddenly there's a slight movement, a little paw-like hand in the sand, and then the child attempts to lift its heavy head and can't. So there is also this filmic quality to Tom's work—all these stills from the movie that is life—and his downbeat film-noir sensibility is very evocative. For one thing, only black-and-white prints. Tom, like others who capture that halting stillness and its poetics, worked exclusively in black-and-white. I would suggest as well that in a quietly expressive way he was able to amplify silence. John Cage did that most famously, and it's worth noting that among Tom's portraits of artists is a very fine picture of Cage from 1985. Here, Tom seems to regard a person no differently than he would the face of a mountainside.

NS In your catalogue text you make comparisons between Tom's pictures and Peter Hujar's, and wrote: "Tom Sandberg’s is a world where life is always in the balance; we are in it, but only in passing. We can experience an intense connection to it, and share it with one another, and at the same time be awed by how insignificant we are in relation to its vastness." The show at PS1 was so well put together. How was it to collaborate on it with him? You organized several exhibitions with photographers. How did you see Tom's work in comparison? And how was the show received?

BN In my text I also refer to Edward Weston, Weegee, Robert Frank, William Klein, and Brassaï. That's very good company in which to be included, but also for them to be in his company. While the art of the past helps us to understand the art of the present, so too can the art of the present inform what came before. Time is never really moving in one linear direction, and histories overlap. In Tom's case, this may have something to do with the timeless quality of his pictures, the sense that their position is not so easily fixed. What year is it? And is it night or day? In the end, this doesn't really matter. Like the ghostly image of the plane that seems to float above the runway, the pictures hover in time. Tom and I occasionally met in Paris, and on one occasion I was celebrating my birthday, for which Tom gave me Henri Cartier-Bresson's Scrapbook. Maybe if we had been in Oslo or in New York it wouldn't have registered in the same way, but because there was such a strong connection between the pictures and the place, I felt as if the activity represented in the book, that pursuit of the world in passing, its sadness and its mystery, what was known and unknown, was also Tom's activity.
The other photographers I had previously done shows with at PS1 were William Gedney and Peter Hujar, who were no longer alive, which meant that I was dealing with pictures and not the person who made them. There was an exhibition with Stephen Shore, we showed an entire series and hung the pictures almost exactly as they came out of the crates—a very democratic process. With Wolfgang Tillmans, although his plan was based on my invitation and our initial conversations, he is in many ways his own best curator. He had very definite ideas for what he wanted to do, and an overall vision for the show. Around that time I proposed to bring a survey of Louise Lawler's work to the museum, but she decided against a big New York show in that moment. So the exhibition with Tom turned out to be my last at PS1. It was easy to work with him. We respected one another and he trusted me—in part because he was somewhat nervous and I was totally confident. I knew it would be good from the beginning. There were a lot of great pictures to choose from and we had plenty of space. The show was given the largest galleries in the museum. I think he was curious to see how someone else responded to his work in the choosing and installation of a show. As the works were placed and hung, everything was discussed between the two of us, and we were both happy with the results. Many who came, including otherwise well-informed critics and curators, couldn't help wondering how it was they were unaware of Tom's work, and it was clear that his pictures had made a very strong impression. Despite the fact that he had been working for some time, his art was very much a discovery in New York.

NS  For this issue we have invited a number of artists to have conversations with each other on the state of photography after Tom. One predicted that Tom's pictures will stand out even a hundred years from now as the work of Munch does. Two artists are also looking at current trends, and are very pessimistic, stating: "All we see are repetitions of previous work. Different varieties of something old, out-dated and worn out." We are curious on your thoughts on both Tom's legacy and the work seen today?

John Cage, 1985, Tom Sandberg

BN Who can say whether Tom's work will stand a hundred years from now? Anyway, none of us will be around. And yet if you look at what contemporary picture-making concerns itself with today, it's doubtful that it will somehow captivate people in the future. It's not so fascinating to us now. The sort of calculated realism/surrealism you see nowadays, with oddly combined objects photographed against various color backgrounds, or manipulated with cheap effects, they may look strange or surprising on first view, but tend to flatten and appear more normal every time after. A hundred years from now, maybe two years from now, they may be mistaken for advertising or design.

As for Tom's legacy, I suspect that people will come back to it over and again. It will continue to be discovered and re-discovered, for at least as long as people remain interested in art, and in how we attempt to make sense of passing through this life.