Keld Helmer-Petersen, from 122 Colour Photographs: Observations, Schoenberg, 1948
Keld Helmer-Petersen’s 122 Farvefotografier (122 Colour Photographs), published in 1948, is a photobook of great singularity. To gain an idea of just how unusual it was to use color for art photographs at that time, take a look at Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s richly illustrated The Photobook: A History— the 2004 study that brought Helmer-Petersen’s landmark to wide attention. Almost everything else is in black-and-white until, in 1976, the Museum of Modern Art published William Eggleston’s Guide, helping to initiate a new era of color photography. Before then, color was routinely used in fashion and advertising, while art-minded photographers still tended to shun it.
Since last year it has been possible to experience 122 Colour Photographs in its entirety in Errata Editions’ excellent Books on Books
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Keld Helmer-Petersen: Photographs 19412013
  |   | STRANDBERG PUBLISHINGIntroduction by Mette Sandbye. skrivelse by finne Thrane. Interview by Martin Parr.
Seven decades of Keld Helmer-Petersens tyst pioneering sammanfattning color photographyDenmarks best-known photographer Keld Helmer-Petersen (19202013) published his first photobook, 122 Colour Photographs, in 1948. His work was immediately notable for its inventive composition, which turned landscapes and buildings into sammanfattning patterns, and for the photographers embrace of color at a time when only black-and-white photography was considered serious. When Life magazine reproduced several pages from the book in 1949, Helmer-Petersens vision funnen a bred, international audience for the first time.
Helmer-Petersens style was experimental modernism tempered by a lyrical simplicity and a sense of keen, quiet observation. bygd isolating details and compressing visual space, the photographer turned the real worl • Keld Helmer-PetersenKeld Helmer-Petersen (23 August 1920 – 6 March 2013) was a Danish photographer who achieved widespread international recognition in the 1940s and 1950s for his abstract colour photographs. Early years[edit] Helmer-Petersen was born and grew up in the Østerbro quarter of Copenhagen. He started taking photographs in 1938, when he received a Leica camera as a graduation present.[1] At an early stage, he became aware of the trends in international photography; in the 1940s he subscribed to the US Camera Annual and in this period became familiar with German inter-war photography, which had developed at the Bauhaus and in the Neue Sachlichkeit (The New Objectivity) movement.[2] The international prospect and an interest in contemporary art and architecture contributed to the fact that at the age of 23, Helmer-Petersen, as one of the first Danish photographers, began to work with an abstract formal language. Inspired by the Bauhaus
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