Keld Helmer-Petersen (1920-2013) was a Danish photographer who became internationally known and recognised for his abstract black and white photography. He grew up in Copenhagen and began his career in photography in 1938, later experimenting with the contrast in industrial areas and architectural constructions that he later became acclaimed for. He was inspired by both German and American Modernist photography of the time, both of which saw architecture as a structural device and the camera lens as a way of capturing the rapid changes in society.

His most well-known images and the style that he is credited for uses a very high contrast to remove any of the mid tones and transform the image to become almost unidentifiable as the object or scene that it captured. His images most often use strong lines and bold shapes to make for an interesting photograph, and for the most part, they were taken in highly industrial zones in urbanised cities.

He first made his name in photography with his book 122 Colour Photographs in 1948, then went on to publish more, Frameworks: Photographs, 1950-1990 and Keld Helmer-Petersen: Photographs 1941-1995. Whilst he was very well known for his later black and white photgraphs, he actually began to achieve fame through the colour images in his first book, which stayed with the same themes of urbanism, minimalism and the modern world, but often focused more on specific details of normal objects than the iconic high contrast images he produced later.

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