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 pioneering effort with 122 Colour Photographs brought Helmer-Petersen a grant from the Denmark–America Foundation to study at the Institute of Design in Chicago (founded by László Moholy-Nagy in 1937 under the name New Bauhaus). During his stay at the school, he both taught and studied under (among others) the American photographer Harry Callahan. Helmer-Petersen began to experiment with the contrast in graphic black and white expression influenced by constructivist artists and their fascination with industry’s machines and architecture’s constructions. A selection of the photographs that Helmer-Petersen created in Chicago was published in the little book Fragments of a City (1960). This offers a portrait of the city in thirty-five tightly composed graphic images and is a radical example of Helmer-Petersen’s graphic and formal experimentation.

Helmer-Petersen’s approach to photography was by and large experimental and explorative. Again and again, he worked on the borders of what we normally consider to be photography. Among other things, throughout his career he worked with “cameraless” photography, the photogram (a darkroom technique in which objects are placed directly on light-sensitive photographic paper). His curiosity about pushing the limits of the media was expressed in several experimental short films, including Copenhagen Boogie from 1949.

From the 1970s, Helmer-Petersen was preoccupied with the figurative potential in found objects. Like Irving Penn (and at the same time), Helmer-Petersen walked sidewalks, head down, making discoveries among the windswept and downtrodden street refuse. This resulted in works such as the series Deformationer. From 1974 to 1993, he created a large series of close-up abstract colour photographs of walls, timber stacks, etc. A selection of these was published in the book Danish Beauty, in 2004.

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for these images i changed the threshold creating the black and white look a lot like Keld Helmer Petersen’s work but for the second one I inverted it to have a slightly different one

Keld Helmer-Petersen

who was he ?

Keld Helmer-Petersen is one of the most influential Danish photographers in the 20thCentury. He was an international pioneer in colour photography and was a central figure in not only Danish but also European modernist photography. His career spanned 70 years and he had strong interest in modern architecture, industrial areas and structures. He was very prolific and continuously experimented and challenged the many possibilities of the photographic image. His efforts have put a mark on photography as an artistic expression.

Contact Sheets

Below are some of my contact sheets – I imported my images into Lightroom, into a new collection called Urban Landscapes. I then used the P and X tools to select and deselect my images and find my favourites.

Here I have used P and X to delete images from my selection that are out of focus, overexposed or hazy.

Here I have de-selected images with not the best composition, a wonky horizon line, or an uninteresting subject.

In this contact sheet, I had some trouble with overexposure – I deselected these images and cropped some of my favourites that still had this issue to improve the quality of the image.

Havre Des Pas Buildings and housing images

These images are mostly in the style of my artist John Myers. I am planning to edit these in high contrast black and white to emulate his work. These were taken around Havre Des Pas pool, along the Boardwalk, and towards La Collette.

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Machinery and abstract images

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Typology Images

These images are going to be used as part of my images in the style of Berndt and Hilla Becher, who created Typologies that were a key part of The New Topographics.

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Evaluation

Overall, I think this shoot was really successful compared to some of my others. The bright and sunny weather really helped to prevent over/under-exposed images, as well as using the correct settings (landscape) and lens for the genre and idea I was focussing on. I had a bit of trouble with not enough/ too much zoom in my images, which created a few unbalanced compositions, however, I managed to fix this with the help of cropping.