Sverre Aurstad

Sverre Aurstad is a renowned photographer who specializes in the use of analogue cameras and black-and-white film. He regards light as an active form-defining factor in his pictures. Aurstad writes this about his work:

Photography's breakthrough in the 19th century was characterized by the fact that you could now show reality as it is. But the photograph doesn't do that. No other art form creates expectations of an exact reproduction, then immediately replaces documentation with form. Photography is unique in its ability to exist disguised as reality and at the same time to escape from this reality. This is a driving force in my work.

I move in the borderlands between reality and abstraction.

My encounter with landscape has three elements: the raw topography, the personal processing and the symbolic or metaphorical value of the finished image (when I succeed). The actual, the personal and the symbolic are always with me regardless of the theme of the work. This way of thinking allows me to believe that our endeavors may still be worth the effort.

Man destroys nature and the environment at full speed if short-term profit is in view, and working with landscape and nature seems more relevant today than ever.

The Norwegian writer Kari Saanum opened one of my exhibitions ( Time with Trees - 2022) and said, among other things: "These gnarled, deformed and partly bare, bearded, dead tree trunks may bring to mind another artist who worked with trees that motive, Lars Hertervig. But where Hertervig's trees often stand alone in deserted, deserted landscapes, Sverre Aurstad's forest is alive, bewitched, enigmatic, magically exciting. Adventurous, in the best sense. Light plays a decisive shaping role in the image. At the same time, the light in many of the images creates confusion. Mirror effects, boundaries that are erased and canceled, create uncertainty about what is upside down in the image - and the world. This is Kittelsen's fairytale forest, inhabited and enlivened, but not as a nature-romantic icon, rather with an echo of modernity's double, disturbing experience of nature's beauty, juxtaposed with its chaotic power and the potential for doom and destruction."