Technique and Craftsmanship Employed in Light Painting

Andrea Henkens

Photography usually records a moment in the past. It should be seen as a memory and “at no point as a copy of reality, but as an emanation of the past reality”, as Roland Barthes writes in his Notes on Photography . This approach becomes visible in Nicolaisen’s photography: past and present become one.

A similar outline can be found with Hiroshi Sugimoto: His sea- scapes are, as he describes it, “equally divided between sky and sea because these elements have been in motion, ever since their emergence. They differ only by light and weather, representing the repetitive rhythm of nature.

Nicolaisen’s glacial pictures feature an analog rhythm of light and time, based on the internal experience of the artist. He perceives landscape not only visually but also emotionally. Nicolaisen develops a consistent photographic perception, which turns the surface of a landscape into a designed and reduced image, without losing touch with the motif. His conceptual approach puts him on one level with the sub- jective photography of Minor White or Otto Steinert, as he pho- tographically fixates the ever variegating motifs of glaciers and ice.

Landscape Photography as Medium of Self-Perception

Nicolaisen demands the beholder’s imagination. The visual acuity is trained by the transformations of crystalline shapes and structures. In his conceptual design of natural shapes, human intervention rarely becomes apparent. No creature or signs of civilization are portrayed so that the sublime, wild and pristine in the grandiose nature of glaciers, arctic sea and mountain ranges can be found. Abstract shapes invite you to behold and linger, like in the image Black Pearl.

Nothing is staged, yet the images achieve a virtually radiant magic. On the one hand, they suggest approachability on the other hand; they appear alienated, desolate, forbidding and almost unreal. They show the magnitude and the majestic dignity of glaciers, composed like uneventful panels of calm. Monochrome tones and detailed surface structures at times appear in captivating colors ranging from surreal deep blue to shiny turquoise and sometimes in fine hues of gray. Spectacular formations and the smallest lines and shapes are visible, tiny details seem like ornaments in the high resolution and the perfect quality of the prints, which Nicolaisen developed himself. His focus is essentially on the image. It is not the document in the scientific sense that is of interest, but the subjective dimension, which at the same time remains to be documentary. His images are poetic; virtually painteresque and are not political in a sense of a time-critical manifesto.

Contemporary photographers evidently find a special appeal in the topic landscape. Many devote themselves to it as a point of nativeness, a retreat and idyll, paying homage to beauty. You find jungles in the works of Thomas Ruff, mountains with Axel Hütte, the forest with Jitka Hanzlová and the fjords and icebergs of Peter Olaf Becker, to name a few. In the age of lost or disappearing landscapes, destroyed and endangered regions, photography sharpens the visual awareness of this change. This makes Nicolaisen’s images, in all their artistic quality, a plea to preserve and protect nature, as well.