[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.
This was an audacious début by an autodidactic photographer who wanted to assert the position of photography as an independent art form.
[3] The pioneering effort with 122 Colour Photographs brought Helmer-Petersen a grant from the Denmark–America Foundation to study at the Institute of Design in Chicago (founded by László Moholy-Nagy in 1937 under the name New Bauhaus).
Helmer-Petersen began to experiment with the contrast in graphic black and white expression influenced by constructivist artists and their fascination with industry’s machines and architecture’s constructions.
Among other things, throughout his career he worked with “cameraless” photography, the photogram (a darkroom technique in which objects are placed directly on light-sensitive photographic paper).
Like Irving Penn (and at the same time), Helmer-Petersen walked sidewalks, head down, making discoveries among the windswept and downtrodden street refuse.
From 2008 up until his death, he placed a variety of old negatives and found objects; refuse, insects, wires, etc., on a flatbed scanner in order to treat them digitally (with the help of the photographer Jens Frederiksen).
Architecture and design played a great role in Helmer-Petersen’s work, both professionally and as an artistic field of interest.
In the decades that followed, he worked as a photographer for his generation of architects and designers, including Finn Juhl, Jørgen Bo, Jørn Utzon and Poul Kjærholm.
Helmer-Petersen’s archives were donated to the Royal Danish Library, which has digitized and provided public access to a major part of his negatives and transparencies.