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 A former commercial photographer, turned software developer, turned photographic artist, Ole Henriksen wants his pictures to express the bare essentials of the world around him. He defines these as light, color, form and texture and those four elements are the essence of his pictures. |
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The Artist
Born 1950 in Copenhagen, Denmark, Ole Henriksen trained in business, photography and graphic arts in the late 1960s and opened a commercial photographic studio in 1971. He left photography and joined the computer revolution in 1980. He moved to London, England in 1985 and retired from computer software in 1987. Travelling many parts of the world in the 1990s he returned to photography for personal expression and during a long stay in the Australian outback, he found a visual voice which had eluded him in his commercial work. A Visual Language While he enjoyed working to spec in the world of commercial photography, it left little room for a personal visual expression. After a ten year break from photography, he started taking pictures again but this time purely for himself. During six monthsÂ’ travels in the Australian outback, the brilliant light and stark nature of that country set him on a path to his own visual language. |
Since a photograph is inevitably an abstraction of its object, he decided to seek out those elements which can be readily contained in a picture. He defines these as the elements which a person can perceive with only one eye open and no other senses, for such a creature is the camera. He calls them the natural picture elements:
Light, Color, Form and Texture Such a picture is not a representation of its object or an attempt to duplicate it but an interpretation of it. Most importantly, it is open to further interpretation by the viewer who then becomes an active part of the creative process. Ole Henriksen's pictures, apart from a brief title, are generally not identified as to subject matter or location. To him, the subject transforms into light, color, form and texture and entirely breaks its bonds with the objective world even before the image passes the lens. Sometimes recognizable, but often not, his pictures are meant to be what you, the viewer, think they are. He combines this imaginative approach with a devotion to such classic photographic virtues as sharpness, detail and tonal range. |