Kirsten Klein

Last updated

Kirsten Klein (born 18 January 1945) is a Danish photographer who since the mid-1970s has lived on the island of Mors. She has become one of Denmark's foremost landscape photographers, developing a highly characteristic, somewhat melancholic style, frequently achieved by employing older photographic techniques.

Contents

Early life

Born in Stockholm, she completed her photographic studies in 1966. From 1967, she travelled widely, in particular to the United States, Central and South America, and later, to Ireland and Iceland. In 1976, she settled on the Danish island of Mors in northern Jutland. [1]

Artistic style

It was on Mors where, inspired by the island's landscape, she developed her characteristic style which has continued to evolve ever since: sensitive, poetic and often melancholy depictions of landscapes, marked by the changing seasons, the weather, human cultivation and the unending effects of nature itself. The sea is also a recurring theme: she has specialized in photographing the coasts of the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Her work takes us on a kind of romantic, religious journey through nature. [2] She works in all weathers and all season, showing her familiarity with nature. The part of nature that interests her the most is the transition between near and far and the wealth of shades of grey that lie in between the black of the shadow and the white light. [3]

In her photography, Klein looks for the moments that have a touch of eternity in them. She looks for the timelessness of thousand-year-old tree trunks or stone formations which testify to the landscape's slow topographical development. In this context, nature is revealed as an organic whole, hardly touched by mankind. [4]

Since the end of the 1980s, she has produced black-and-white photographs, often employing older techniques such as cyanotype and platinum printing.

Awards

She was awarded the Thorvald Bindesbølls medal in 1994 and is the only female photographer in Denmark to be awarded a lifelong grant from the Danish Arts Foundation. [5]

In 2001, she was the first photographer to be awarded Jyllands-Posten's cultural prize [6] and in 2012, the first photographer to receive the Thorvaldsen Medal. [7]

Bibliography

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ansel Adams</span> American photographer and environmentalist (1902–1984)

Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating "pure" photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. He and Fred Archer developed a system of image-making called the Zone System, a method of achieving a desired final print through a technical understanding of how the tonal range of an image is the result of choices made in exposure, negative development, and printing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ellen Auerbach</span> American photographer

Ellen (Rosenberg) Auerbach was a German-born American photographer who is best remembered for her innovative artwork for the ringl+pit studio in Berlin during the Weimar Republic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laura Gilpin</span> American fine art photographer

Laura Gilpin was an American photographer.

Linda Connor is an American photographer living in San Francisco, California. She is known for her landscape photography.

Heather Hazel Angel MSc is a British nature photographer, author and television presenter.

Amanda Means is an American artist and photographer. She currently lives and works in Beacon, NY.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Photography in Denmark</span>

In Denmark, photography has developed from strong participation and interest in the very beginnings of the art in 1839 to the success of a considerable number of Danes in the world of photography today.

The Dansk Fotografisk Forening (DFF) or Danish Photographers Association is a non-profit organization for photographers who earn a living from photography. Since 1879, it has been supporting professional photography and assisting its members.

Rigmor Mydtskov was a Danish court photographer who is remembered for her portraits of artists performing in Danish theatres but especially for her many portraits of Queen Margrethe and other members of the Danish royal family.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Viggo Rivad</span> Danish photographer

Viggo Reinholdt Rivad was a Danish photographer who started as an autodidact in 1946, and went on to win numerous competitions in the 1950s and 1960s. Around 1960, he adopted his so-called "essay approach", resulting in a series of related photographs, such as Et farvel (1962) and Laurits (1971). Rivad, who also earned a living as a taxi driver, was a quiet, dedicated photographer, concentrating on disadvantaged areas and people on the fringes of society. His humanitarian messages were a result of his indignation, and his concern for society's outcasts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Krass Clement</span> Danish photographer

Krass Clement Kay Christensen is a Danish photographer who has specialized in documentary work. He graduated as a film director in Copenhagen but soon turned to still photography, publishing his first book Skygger af øjeblikke in 1978. He has since become an active documentary photographer, focusing on people from both Denmark and abroad. His earlier work is black and white but since 2000 he has also worked in colour.

Morten Bo, is a Danish photographer who has specialized in documentary work with a social impact. His 15 travelling exhibitions in the 1970s and 1980s proved quite controversial. In the 1980s, he turned to more abstract photography with lines, contours and contrasts of light and shade. A member of Delta-Photos from 1967 to 1972, in 1973, he was a co-founder of the Ragnarok group. In line with his interest in promoting the art, he founded Fatamorgana, Denmark's school of art photography, in 1989.

Astrid Kruse Jensen is a Danish photographer and visual artist. She studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in the Netherlands and the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. Her artistic work is often characterized by its dreamy qualities, blurring the boundaries between memory, consciousness, reality, and illusion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kristen Feilberg</span> Danish photographer (1839–1919)

Kristen Feilberg or Christen Schjellerup Feilberg was an early Danish photographer who is known mainly for his images captured far beyond the borders of Denmark. From the 1860s until the 1890s, Feilberg participated in expeditions to Sumatra, Singapore, and Penang. In 1867, he exhibited photos at the Paris World Exposition and around 1870 he joined an expedition to the Batak lands of North Sumatra with the Dutch explorer C. de Haan from which he returned with 45 successful "photogrammes".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Women photographers</span> Women working as photographers

The participation of women in photography goes back to the very origins of the process. Several of the earliest women photographers, most of whom were from Britain or France, were married to male pioneers or had close relationships with their families. It was above all in northern Europe that women first entered the business of photography, opening studios in Denmark, France, Germany, and Sweden from the 1840s, while it was in Britain that women from well-to-do families developed photography as an art in the late 1850s. Not until the 1890s, did the first studios run by women open in New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harold Davis (photographer)</span> American photographer and author

Harold Davis is an American photographer and author.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Susan Middleton</span> American photographer and author

Susan Middleton is an American photographer and author based in San Francisco. She is most known for her photographs of rare and endangered animals, plants, and sites. She was Chair of the Department of Photography at the California Academy of Sciences from 1982 to 1995, where she currently serves as Research Associate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrea Hamilton</span> Peruvian artist

Andrea Jarvis Hamilton is a conceptual artist and fine-art photographer best known for her extensive series of photographic images of the ocean, natural phenomena and the Kelvin scale. Her work encompasses the long term, systematic collection of subjects within a strict conceptual framework, creating expansive archives. These are retrospectively organised according to common visual characteristics into series which highlight certain themes: the nature of time and memory, climate change, colour theory and being. Her work also encompasses still life, long exposure, landscape and portraiture, street photography and landscape.

Barbara Bosworth is an American artist, educator, and photographer. She works primarily with a large-format, 8x10 view camera and focuses on the relationship between humans and nature. Bosworth's works have been included in magazines, journals, books and permanent collections, and shown in solo exhibits nationally and internationally. In 1985, she won a Guggenheim fellowship for her photographic work.

References

  1. Kirsten Klein. From Den store Danske. (in Danish) Retrieved 6 February 2010.
  2. Mette Sandbye, "Kirsten Klein" from Weilbachs Kunstnerleksikon. (in Danish) Retrieved 16 February 2010.
  3. "Kirsten Klein".
  4. Astrid la Cour, "Tæt på evigheden i nuet", in Berlinske Tidene, 22 November 2007. (in Danish). Retrieved 16 February 2010.
  5. Kirsten Klein udstiller på Museet for Fotokunst. From Kulturplakaten [ permanent dead link ]. (in Danish). Retrieved 15 February 2010.
  6. Lars Olde Knippel, Fuglefri med æren. From kpn.dk. (in Danish). Retrieved 16 February 2010.
  7. "Motivering for medaljemodtagelse" Archived 2013-12-28 at the Wayback Machine , Akademiraadet. (in Danish) Retrieved 5 June 2012.