INTRODUCTION BY MARTIN PETERSEN
The good thing about being a landscape photographer
is that you have to seek out the landscape.
You’ve got to be there, you’ve got to be present.
I believe that landscapes contain a primordial part
of ourselves, which they give back to us, when
we go wandering around within them.
- Per Bak Jensen
My first encounter with the name Per Bak Jensen was when I sat down by myself to get a cup of coffee and to read the newspapers. On the front of the cultural section I was met by an endless forest. There was no upper limit, the treetops had been cut out of the picture, and the mist in the bottom of the image made it impossible to see if the forest was endless or stopped on the other side of what was visible. Forest floor, tree trunks and fog. Very simple, but moving in a way that made me take note of the photographers name for later use.
It turned out that the newspaper was not my first encounter with Per Bak Jensen. Years earlier I had seen his exhibition “Return” in the Danish art museum Aros. The photos of plastic encapsulated straw bales, fog enshrouded fields with remnants of snow, and the first fragile green shoots of the approaching summers crops sprouting up was still with me in my subconscious. Barely subject matter, but rather random snapshots taken with an intense aesthetic gravity that runs through Per Bak Jensen’s work like a red line. Despite its abstract form this is a recognizable element in his work.
Another recognizable element is his choice of subject matter . He chooses to capture places that we have all passed but don’t take further notice of. The types of places that we don’t remember as anything other than a part of what we in our conceptual world know as a landscape. It should be mentioned that Per Bak Jensen has also worked with cityscapes, but it is as a landscape photographer that he impresses me the most.
If you read up on Per Bak Jensen you will learn that his mission statement is to capture “the being of the places” but there is more to retrieve from Per Bak Jensen’s photos than the what subjects alone can bear. They stand outside time, and time in his pictures is a long breath where the movement of birds and planes are smeared out, and the waves on the water have been smothered by the camera’s shutter speed. The subjects of his large pictures, despite their static immobility, still seem alive. «I want to make the photographs big, for then I really think they seduce me. And I want them sharp as well, for I want them to resemble reality as much as possible. When I look out on reality, I feel everything is equally sharp».
Per Bak Jensen was born in 1949. He had his debut in 1978, and was educated at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts 1980-86. He worked from 1987-2009 as assistant professor of photography at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. His works are represented throughout a wide variety of Danish Museums, and can also be found at Biblioteque Nationale in Paris, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
© All copyright remains with photographer Per Bak Jensen