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Henrik Saxgren searches for and finds artistic potential and creative will in the most obscure places. In his series Unintended Sculptures, which he has been working on since 2001, Saxgren finds relational forms, structures, and optical illusions that seem to have been deliberately set in the landscape by the artist’s hand.Saxgren is a photographer with strong opinions, and this book is no exception. Though his images of landscape are of exceptional beauty, they also reflect the astute gaze of a civilization critic. Hard to typecast as an artist, with this work Saxgren accomplishes the difficult task of revealing man’s misadventures in shaping the natural world as he dares to show us the splendor in its devastation.

The Accidental Masterpieces of Henrik Saxgren
By Bill Kouwenhoven, Berlin, May 2009

Like all photographers, Henrix Saxgren is a difficult one to pin down. Is he a documentary photographer, a photojournalist, or an artist? Is he all three or none of the above? The language of photography, even more than the language of art, is very slippery. Indeed, for the first half of its life, the new medium was viewed either as an invention of mechanics and alchemists or as a threat to art itself-”From this day, painting is dead,” Paul Delaroche, 1839. Photography in all its forms labored under this burden for at least 50 years until Alfred Stieglitz fought to establish it as an art form with his 291 Gallery in New York (1905-1929) and his influential journal Camera Work (1902-1917). Even then it took another 70 some years for the medium to be established as an art form in the minds of many.Part of the problem, of course, is that photography has been considered “the most democratic art form” from the time of Louis Daguerre’s public patent (1839) which more than William Henry Fox Talbot’s simultaneous efforts did more to help promote photography as an accessible medium and through George Eastman’s breakthrough Kodak box cameras (1887). The legions of shutterbugs and snap shooters who followed appeared to demean photography as a viable medium for art. After all, anybody could make a picture once the Kodak got established-”You press the button, we do the rest,” as the legendary marketing phrase goes. It would seem that anyone can become an artist, but only the exceptions, like Henrik Saxgren, prove that rule.

Despite the fact that noted artists had taken up the little box or made use of larger devices, the revolutionary leap that transformed photography had less to do with the radical transformations of technology but rather the embrace of it by radical artists like Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray in the 1920s and 1930s, not for its aesthetic abilities, however, but because photography could produce at whim the ultimate “Ready Made” or “Objet Trouvée”. When Duchamp selected a porcelain urinal back in 1917 and installed it in the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York, his “Fountain” revolutionized art by virtue of his declaring by personal fiat, in his role as artist-curator, that this object was indeed art. Essentially this revolutionary gesture changed the role of the artist from that of homo faber, the maker of things, to that of the curator, the determiner of what was art. In other words, everything in the world became available as a potential objet d’ art. This was both scandalous and liberating because, among other things, it changed the impetus of art from creating something to be art to be art to declaring things to be art worthy. For photographers, this was immensely liberating. For the first time, artists could go forth into the world and “capture” images of things and so declare them to be works of art by virtue of declaring them to be beautiful and interesting-that is to say art worthy.

For a photographer such as Henrik Saxgren, this has proved to be a revelation. Saxgren is a noted photojournalist and documentary photographer with several important books to his credit, including Point of View (1996) and Solomon’s House (2000). With War and Love (2006), he has moved exclusively into the realm of documentary photography. As a photojournalist, Saxgren’s subject matter determined his approach and his aesthetics. His art has been humanist, tracing the situations of children in wartime, for example, with an artist’s eye for detail and composition and a journalist’s sense of storytelling. His work is powerful and responds to the story he wants to tell. As both a photojournalist and documentary photographer he has been faithful to his subject matter and does not alter what came before his camera to produce the final image. This fierce veracity is necessary to his sense of righteousness as a journalist who wishes to move us by presenting us with actual situations of human misery that we feel compelled to do something to relieve the situations.

For years, Saxgen would research stories in Nicaragua, Palestine, or Scandinavia that needed to be addressed and documented them, yet this mode of photography proved insufficient for his sense of himself as an artist. The transition point for him was War and Love, a series of documentary portraits of immigrants to Scandinavia, photographed in the direct manner of August Sander whose legendary opus, People of the 20th Century. Sander depicted people in their working or domestic environment without embellishment to create a portrait of German society in the 1920s and early 1930s that has influenced photography ever since. In addition to telling these important stories of human situations, Saxgren discovered that he was also moved by the aesthetic implications of man’s impact on his environment. This book, Unintended Sculptures, is the result of this revelation, and it represents a leap of faith into the territory pioneered by the likes of Duchamp and Man Ray.

The title of his book alludes to the Ready-Made, the Objet Trouvée, and all the art that has flowed forth from Duchamp’s Fountain. Saxgren has assumed a new role, not as story-teller, but as artist-curator. His trained eye seizes on the details of our landscapes, on the everyday absurdities or our abandoned things and our constructions. His is an everyday Surrealism that delights in the play of light on a man-made structure or an abandoned airplane. With every image Saxgren argues “Why is this remnant of a Icelandic whaling station with its brick smokestack and boiler set against a fjord in the amazing light of the high north not worthy of being as valuable an art work as any painting or sculpture?” That is a fair question, and with it, Saxgren makes us look at what we would otherwise take for granted or outright ignore.

The title of this essay takes its cue from musings of the New York Time’s chief art critic, Michael Kimmelman, on the nature of art: The Accidental Masterpiece, On the Art of Life and Vice Versa (2005), in which he persuasively argues that “creating, collecting, and even just appreciating art can make living a daily masterpiece.” The people, artists, collectors, and the like, produce things or collect things they find whether they are lightbulbs or existential moments. The act of selection, in the hands of someone inspired, elevates these everyday things or experiences into an art form. Compounding Walt Whitman and Joseph Beuys, he cites the latter, “the enlarged conception of art includes every human action.” This, then, can be seen as the guiding spirit behind Henrik Saxgren’s own compilation of found objects.

With the magpie eye of the photographer, Saxgen has travelled the world in search of stories to tell. Along the route, he has seen many things that he photographed but put aside while working on his main projects, most notably in Scandinavia and Spain. He thus simultaneously created this other archive of images of singular man-made objects seemingly abandoned in nature. These enigmatic things, for want of a better word, take on the position of the mysterious wrapped object in Man Ray’s famous photograph of 1920, The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse, which depicts an object wrapped in a blanket and tied up crudely with rope. We are compelled to wonder what it is that is in that blanket. Further compelled by the fact that, a la Duchamp, it is art because the artist-curator says it is art, we are forced to wonder why. Yet being forced to contemplate such a thing draws us into the artist’s game and provokes what Duchamp would call “the retinal shudder.

“Saxgren’s catalogue of images, his “Unintended Sculptures,” includes many wrapped objects set in beautiful landscapes, road signs or goalposts in the middle of nowhere, gateways that no longer guard anything, dead forests, partially decapitated palm trees, plastic covered fields, and dozens of other motives. Each is enigmatic and all but silently screams, “Why?” It is not merely the thing itself that appeared before Saxgren’s shutter that we see. Saxgren’s magic is, following the adage of Edward Weston, that master of vegetable photography, “that the photograph must be more than the thing itself,” to elevate these things from their derelict status to that of sculpture, that is to say of “art” itself.

The humanist aesthetic that so clearly manifested itself in his earlier photography is also at work in these images. In image after image Saxgen finds objects that point out man’s smallness in the face of nature. The abandoned buildings and wrecked airplanes echo Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous 1818 poem Ozimandius, a touchstone of the Romantic Sublime:I met a traveller from an antique landWho said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,Half sunk, a shattererd visage lies, whose frown,And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,Tell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:And on the pedestal these words appear:”My name is Ozimandius, king of kings:Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal wreck, boundless and bareThe lone and level sands stretch far away.–Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818Nothing beside remains but the pathos of man’s folly.

Time after time, Henrik Saxgren finds these talismanic images in the everyday detritus of humankind and transmutes them into art. At heart, Saxgen is indeed a Romantic, yet his photographic gesture owes more to the Duchamps than the Caspar David Friedriches of the world in his use of photography and his artful method of the selection of his motives. He is able to evoke nostalgia out of an abandoned chimney or awe before nature out of the play of light and shadow on a building or quarry. A windsock above a small pyramid on an abandoned gunnery range in Iceland has an otherworldliness to it. A concrete block on a sand dune seems to stand in for all the ruined palaces of antiquity. A bricked in gate or window speaks to the failure of communication. And so on. These are but mute objects seemingly unworthy of the status of art. Seen through other eyes, they might well remain invisible and overlooked, but Henrik Saxgren has seen them differently and in a different light, not just the sharp edged natural light that delighted the Romantic painters like Friedrich and Surrealists such as Giorgio de Chirico and Salvador Dalí, other lovers of wrapped objects, but through the light of his own imagination.

Saxgren’s vision is to give these silent things a voice and to present enigmas for us to unwrap. He challenges us with his “retinal shudder” and makes us wonder about the mysteries of this world, about the “whys” and the “whats” and about the forlorn beauty that we all too often overlook.

These “Unintended Sculptures” do form in Henrik Saxgren’s images “accidental masterpieces” in the way Kimmelman describes them. Photography was the art form most cherished by Surrealists like Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray because it enabled them to transform the everyday into art by placing it in new contexts whether as a pure image, a collage, or through the machinations of the medium itself.

It is perhaps wise to end with Kimmelman:”It is always a good thing to keep your eyes wide open, because you never know what you will discover. The drive to live more alertly being an instinctive need, whether you are an artist by trade or desire, the art of seeing well is a necessary skill, which fortunately can be learned.
“This lesson is all too necessary, and we are grateful to photographers for reminding us of the overlooked beauties in the world. Everything has its sublime side. For those who look, everything has a surreal side. Art really is everywhere in the eye of the beholder.

Henrik Saxgren’s eye teaches us that we can find art anywhere. We need only keep our eyes wide open and learn to see. Where others see junk and detritus, Saxgren finds things of beauty. They may not have been conceived of as art works, but seen through the filter of his imagination and through the lens of his camera, these things, the airplanes, palm trees and stacks of wood, the photographs become more than the things themselves. They become art. Look on and enjoy.