Wall of Fame/: Tom Sandberg
Tom Sandberg, Marie, 2002. Property of Preus museum collections.
Sandberg was born in Narvik, Norway, in 1953 but early on moved to Oslo. After working in a photo lab he made contact with the photography and film milieu around Dan Young and the Manité group.
His education took him to England, first to Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham for studies under Paul Hill and Thomas Joshua Cooper, then Derby College of Art under John Blakemore. In 1977 he was involved in starting Fotogalleriet in Oslo.
Sandberg's photographs are subtle and intimate. He adopted a consistent line even if his first pictures had strong contrasts and he later went to larger formats and reduced the scale to vibrant gray and white tones. He employed a poetic and formalist conception. To counteract photography's mirror-like qualities he emphasized the effect of materials and cultivated black-and-white photography.
Gallerists, collectors, and museum personnel quickly discovered Tom Sandberg. Like private collectors, Leif Preus had already bought photographs by him. When Preus's museum became the national museum of photography, it was natural that the collection should be supplemented with more recent work. The Henie Onstad Art Centre, the Norwegian Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Astrup Fearnley Museum, in addition to foreign exhibitions, have contributed to his achieving a position as artist that scarcely any Norwegian photographer of his generation has had.
