Henrik Saxgren: Unintended Sculptures

With the exhibition ”Unintended Sculptures” at The National Museum of Photography, Henrik Saxgren shows yet another facet of his work by a series of landscape photographs from the recesses of the world.

Saxgren is primarily known for his photos from war and conflict areas and his socially indignant reports from slum areas, among others in Nicaragua.

With this new series, Saxgren focuses on the landscape and presents a new way of seeing the relation between nature and culture. In these fascinating pictures of landscapes, man’s long forgotten remnants appear as randomly occurred sculptures.

Behind the immediate beauty of the pictures, one senses, however, a critical undertone, and with a subtle move, the exhibition paints a picture of our time’s relation between nature and civilization. His fascination of beauty in decay is accompanied by his indignation with the careless way modern civilization treats nature.

“Saxgren's cataogue of images, his Unintended Sculptures, includes many wrapped objects set in beautiful landscapes, raod signs or goalposts in the middle of nowhere, gateways that no longer guard anything, dead forests, partially decapitated palm trees, plastic-covered fields, and dozens of other motifs. Each is enigmatic and all but silently screams, "Why?" It is not merely the thing itself that appeared before Saxgren's shutter that we see. Saxgren's magic is, following the adage of Edward Weston, "The photograph must be more than the thing itself," to elevate these things from their derelict status to that of sculpture, that is to say of "art" itself.”

(From Bill Kouwenhouven’s preface to the book Unintended Sculptures)