Working for almost thirty years, exclusively with large format, black-and-white film, Sandberg has produced a remarkable body of work that is consistent in its vision and imbued with a sense of mystery and great depth of feeling. Whether he depicts sublime snow-covered mountains, a car parked in the street, the head of an infant, or a spectral house shrouded in fog, his pictures are about what it means to be alive.
Many of Sandberg’s pictures are aerial views—the earth seen from above, in a sense, in a state of suspension. One of his most hauntingly beautiful pictures is an image of a plane seeming to hover just a few feet above a runway.
He returns time and again to pictures of the sun, the ocean, endless clouds, and the horizon. In some the image is barely visible, as if testing the limits of what the eye can see. Sandberg’s work is about photography, about the act of seeing, and ultimately about being in the world.
Tom Sandberg, Untitled, 2004, silver-gelatin print.
