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About the Danish photographer, Keld HELMER-PETERSEN (1920-2013)
Keld HELMER-PETERSEN was a Danish photographer who achieved widespread international recognition in the 1940s and 1950s for his abstract colour photographs. He started taking photographs in 1938, when he received a Leica camera as a graduation present. In the 1940s he 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, as one of the first Danish photographers, began to work with an abstract formal language. Inspired by the Bauhaus and Albert RENGER-PATZSCH, he published in 1948, the bilingual photo volume '122 Farvefotografier/122 Colour Photographs'. This audacious début by an autodidactic photographer brought him 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. In the early 2000s, he was rediscovered when '122 Colour Photographs' was presented in volume one of Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s three-volume survey of the most notable photobooks: 'The Photobook: A History'. In the wake of this rediscovery, there followed several exhibitions and a renewed international interest in his work.
Photo books by Keld HELMER-PETERSEN
'122 Farvefotografier / 122 Colour Photographs' (1948, his debut); 'Fragments of a City' (1960); 'Photographs 1941–1995' (2007, 2020); 'Black Noise' (2010), 'Back to Black' (2011); 'Books on Books #14. 122 Colour Photographs'; 'Black Light' (2014)