Photography in Denmark
Pioneers Mads Alstrup and Georg Emil Hansen paved the way for a rapidly growing profession during the last half of the 19th century while both artistic and press photographers have made internationally recognized contributions.
Although Denmark was slow to accept photography as an art form, Danish photographers are now increasingly active, participating in key exhibitions around the world.
[1][2] Among Denmark's most successful contemporary photographers are Jacob Aue Sobol, who gained recognition for portraits of his Greenlandic girlfriend, and Per Bak Jensen, who introduced a new perspective to modern landscape photography.
Press photography has prospered too under Jan Grarup and Claus Bjørn Larsen, who have covered wars and conflicts of global importance over the past 20 years.
Christian Tuxen Falbe, a Danish marine officer, was in Paris in January 1839 on behalf of Crown Prince Frederik when Louis Daguerre revealed the art of daguerreotyping.
Falbe informed the Crown Prince of a visit to Daguerre where he had seen some of the very earliest daguerreotypes, explaining how impressed he had been by the new process and how important he thought it would be for art and science in Denmark.
[3] Shortly afterwards, he returned to Copenhagen with a camera and a couple of his own daguerreotypes for the Crown Prince who, believing them to be of scientific importance, deposited them with Hans Christian Ørsted, one of Denmark's most prominent scientists.
It spread rapidly and by the 1870s provided a cheap and attractive alternative to portrait painting for photographers such as Ludvig Grundtvig (1836–1901) and Adolph Lønborg (1835–1916) in Copenhagen, and Heinrich Tønnies (1856–1903) who opened a studio in Aalborg.
At the age of 35, she received training in photography from her family in Hamburg, Germany, where her uncle, Poul Friedrich Lewitz, her aunt and cousins were all photographers.
In 1876, when registering her business in Aalborg, she became one of the first officially recognized female photographers in Denmark when she gave her profession as "Photographin", a German word which clearly shows that she was a woman.
Primarily occupied as a mechanical engineer at the Hana Sugar Plantation, Island of Maui, and later as a technical manager at the Honolulu Iron Works, as an avid amateur photographer he helped found the Hawaiian Camera Club (1889–1893).
His remarkable photographs of the Hawaiian royal family and native social elites remain as some of the earliest images available of pre-annexed Hawaii.
[24] From the 1890s, the Detroit Publishing Company used the Photochrom technique based on chromolithography to produce a large number of colour postcards, many of European cityscapes.
[25] Benefitting from the advent of postcards, Mary Willumsen (1884–1961) photographed women in scanty clothing or nude at the Helgoland beach facility in Copenhagen.
Taking the French-based international photographic bureau Magnum as a model, Jesper Høm, Gregers Nielsen and others set up Delta Photos, a group designed to support journalistic photography.
Jan Grarup, in particular, has covered wars and conflicts around the globe over the past 20 years, earning prestigious awards at home and abroad.
In 1839, Crown Prince Frederik deposited Falbe's daguerreotypes with Ørsted, the secretary of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, despite the fact that Daguerre, the inventor, was an artist.
Notable examples are Peder Severin Krøyer, Jens Ferdinand Willumsen and Laurits Andersen Ring who used photography to obtain more detail and realism in their paintings.
[39] With the advent of photographic societies such as Danske Kamera Piktorialister (Danish Camera Pictorialists) in the 1930s, there was increasing pressure from activists such as H. B. J. Cramer to have photography recognized as an art form.
[42] The situation improved in 1963 when Jesper Høm arranged an exhibition at the Danish Museum of Art & Design with photographers from New York City, Moscow and Paris.
Another positive influence was Keld Helmer-Petersen's book Fragments of a City with photographs of fire escapes and artistically silhouetted cranes taken while he was a student at Chicago's Institute of Design, some of which were published in the magazine Perspectiv.
Subsequent exhibitions involved the landscape photographer Kirsten Klein, the pioneers of staged photography Nanna Bisp Büchert and Lis Steincke, as well as the magic realist Per Bak Jensen.
[40] In the 1990s, after Per Bak Jensen had joined the teaching staff at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen, it was clear that photography had been accepted as an art form.
As evidence, in October 2004, for the very first time, a number of the Academy's students and graduates presented their photographs at an exhibition in Copenhagen's Galleri Asbæk under the common title ”Eye of the Beholder – et blik på portrættet”.
[43] Recognizing the growing status of photography as an art form, artists such as Richard Winther, Stig Brøgger, Jytte Rex, Peter Brandes and Ane Mette Ruge have actively contributed to its development.
