Keld Helmer-Petersen was a Danish photographer who achieved widespread international recognition in the 1940’s and 1950’s for his abstract colour photographs. He is internationally acclaimed for his images of structures, patterns and details found in industrial areas, city scapes and nature.
He established himself as a photographer of architecture and design. Simultaneously, his artistic work shifted towards the more abstract, as he found inspiration in German and American photography as well as international abstract art.
“A strong leaning towards extreme simplicity and graphic clarity in carefully composed compositions, often silhouetted, but more often than not containing subtle greys in contrast to pure black and white.”
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. 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.
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.
Architecture and design played a great role in Helmer-Petersen’s work, both professionally and as an artistic field of interest. From 1952 to 1956, he worked with photographer Erik Hansen, after which he established his own studio specializing in architecture and design photography, in 1956. In the decades that followed, he worked as a photographer for his generation of architects and designers.
Helmer-Petersen is primarily self- taught in photography but studied at the Institute of Design in Chicago in 1950-51
Since 1955 the photographer has run his own studio, specializing in architecture, design and industrial photography. He has also taught photography at the Royal Academy of Art, Copenhagen, since 1964, and at the Department of Art History, University of Lund, Sweden (1978-79). In the 1950s Helmer-Petersen lectured at several schools of design, graphic art, and arts and crafts in Copenhagen.
Awards he won
- 1981: Thorvald Bindesbøll Medaljen
- 1996: Nationalbankens Jubilæumsfonds Hæderslegat
- 2005: Fogtdal Photographers Award, Denmark
- 2011: Forening for Boghåndværks Hæderspris