Dag Alveng: Photographs from Telemark @Deborah Bell

JTF (just the facts): A total of 7 black-and-white photographs, alternately framed in black/unmatted and framed in grey/matted, and hung against white walls in the main gallery space and smaller office area. All of the works are gelatin silver prints, made between 2020-2021 and printed in 2021. The five larger prints in the main space are each sized 60×49 inches (or the reverse) and available in editions of 5+2AP; the two smaller prints in the back are each sized 20×24 inches and are uneditioned. (Installation shots below.)

This project was exhibited at the Telemark Art Museum in 2021 (here, video walkthrough of exhibition here), which is part of the larger Norsk Industriarbeidermuseum complex.

A monograph of this body of work was published in 2021 by Forlaget Press (here). Hardcover (11.5 x 12.5 inches), 156 pages. Includes essays and poems by Amalie Kasin Lerstang. (Cover shot below.)

Comments/Context: In 2015, UNESCO added the Rjukan-Notodden Industrial Heritage area in southern Norway to its World Heritage List. The cultural and historical importance of the region lies in a scientific breakthrough, and the resulting industrialization that transformed the surrounding area.

Back in the early 1900s, increasing population around the world was putting pressure on global food production, driving up the demand for fertilizers. Scientists and engineers in Norway came up with a novel solution to pull nitrogen directly from the air, but the process was energy intensive, making the scale up efforts costly. But the area around what later became the municipalities of Rjukan and Notodden provided a natural solution – the rushing rivers and waterfalls that fell from the nearby mountains could be harnessed to generate hydroelectric power. Norsk Hydro was founded in 1905, and soon the region was filling up with fertilizer factories, ironworks, rail lines to the coast, and other industrial infrastructure, all nestled into the surrounding natural landscape.

In the years after the UNESCO designation, the local Telemark Art Museum invited the Norwegian photographer Dag Alveng to come to the area and make photographs of both the industrial facilities and the nearby landscape. Alveng spent two years traveling around the region making pictures, which ultimately took shape as both an exhibition at the museum in 2021 and as a photobook catalog. This small show in New York samples a few of the large scale prints made for the show, providing a succinct introduction to the project and Alveng’s work more broadly.

Alveng’s contemporary pictures are rooted in the classic large format black-and-white photographic aesthetics of the mid 20th century, where precise technical mastery intermingles with the meditative moods of patient slow looking. His recent images of Rjukan-Notodden seem to draw on the crisp industrial wonder of Albert Renger-Patzsch, the ecological attentiveness of Robert Adams, and the metaphysical poetry of Minor White in almost equal measure, filtering all three through a particular engaged affinity for the Norwegian land. This perspective gives the photographs a subdued, almost timeless feel, with each composition crafted with a measured sense of respectful reverence.

Alveng’s photograph of water pipes on the hillside at Vemork is the most visually striking image in the show, with its strips of piping reaching upward with strict linearity through the forest. It’s a tactile, almost Modernist view, with moss and tiny weeds visible on the concrete dividing walls and the watery stains of age running down the sides of the pipes – only with a large format camera would these details stay so seductively rich when enlarged to the scale of Alveng’s prints. The image celebrates the ingenuity of the engineers, but also raises questions about the environmental consequences of such a project, creating some lingering tension that simmers underneath the elegant symmetry of the arrangement.

Another image of industrial architecture gets in somewhat closer, capturing a series of ducts and ventilation systems on the outside of a building. It’s a strictly rigorous view, in the manner of Bernd and Hilla Becher, but executed with understated warmth, the shining pipes and crusty walls burnished with a seductive glow. This photograph is paired with a narrow rocky view of the Måna river, with the white frothy water flowing down along a steep cliffside. Here again, there is an intricate precision to this high contrast setup, which is then softened by the long exposure, which turns the rushing flow into a swirling mass of ethereal wispy whiteness.

Two other pictures use roads as a centering device, looking down as curved pavement and dirt wind down through the mountains. Both of these pictures are texturally lush, documenting the details of eroded dirt mounds, evergreen branches, dappled light through leaves, and morning mist, and making room to tuck in a waterfall and a farmhouse in the distance. Alveng is particularly aware of the way light activates these scenes, from the freshness of the morning to the bright haze of the afternoon.

Two additional pictures from the Telemark project are on view in the back of the gallery space, which find Alveng noticing the found geometries of a tire track doughnut on the pavement and the divided panes of a cabin window. Again, there is a precision to these compositions that orders these observations with elegant rigidity, Alveng’s eye framing his finds with attentive care.

In the end, Alveng’s photographs from Telemark are an enduring reminder of the power of well crafted large format photography to tell rich, tonally nuanced visual stories. His images start with a sense of national pride, in terms of both historical technological innovation and untamed natural beauty, but they then temper that fervor with nuanced explorations of the human impact on the landscape. Nearly every image can be seen as a meditative interaction (direct or indirect) between the forces of man and nature, Alveng’s photographs ultimately offering an almost philosophical study of the various wonders to be found in the in between spaces.

Collector’s POV: The large prints in this show are priced at $12000, $15000, or $18000, based on the place in the edition, while the smaller prints are priced at $2400 each. Alveng’s work has little secondary market history, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

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JTF (just the facts): Published in 2024 by Photobook Daydream Editions (Instagram link here). Hardcover (6 x 9 inches), 120 pages, with 118 color photographs. In an edition of 50 ... Read on.

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