TITLE: Horizontal Displacement

This series, Horizontal Displacement, is an exploration of the landscape and the natural forces that animate it. Brodersen strives to go beyond simply recording the factual view and tries to convey the tangible experience of being in a landscape. The practice is therefore a balancing act between control and chance; as he is after an image that should feel unrestricted, but that can only be seized in a semi-controlled way.

Brodersen often operates in an expanded temporal register. Through long exposures, multi-exposures or panorama shots, he works with intervals of time, which gives space to the forces in the landscape. He creates a stage for coincidences and probabilities. The method consists of arranging the shots in such ways that unpredictable spatial developments can be captured.

The concept of Archimedes' principle is that an object immersed in a fluid is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object. In Horizontal Displacement, the horizon is photographed from an open drifting boat. The camera used as a tool to register movement becomes a part of the movement it is mapping. Horizontal Displacement employs semi-fast exposures of the horizon, taken throughout the day while being seaborne. 


Where J.M.W. Turner supposedly tied himself to the mast to experience the storm, the camera is tied to its tripod while the conditions are recorded. Semi-fast exposures give unsharp renderings in rough seas and more defined images in calm seas.

The resulting images are evocative materializations of the physical processes at work. The photographs are, to an extent, directly produced by the landscape. They are not images of the landscape, but rather traces of its movement in which a dynamic portrait of the horizon is made.

AUTHOR: Ole Brodersen (Norway)

Ole Brodersen is a Norwegian art photographer who works with staged landscapes. His most known series “Trespassing” explores encounters between man and nature, and is produced in the island society Lyngør where he grew up as 12th generation. He is strongly affiliated to this place and the maritime elements here dominate his motifs. His father is a sail maker, his grandfather was a sailor and he himself used to row to school.

After a brief international career as an art director, Brodersen circumnavigated the Atlantic Ocean for a year. Upon his return he made a gallery on his home island and later pursued photography through assisting the fine art photographer Dag Alveng (represented at MOMA and Metropolitan).

Brodersen‘s photographs was last shown at the Scandinavia House in New York; his participation supported by the Norwegian Consulate and mentioned by the New Yorker and Harper‘s Magazine. His works has been acquired by private and public collections in Norway, Sweden, Serbia, Malawi, the United Arab Emirates and USA. Brodersen has sojourned in New York, Prague, Belgrade, Stockholm and Porto. He is a member of Norwegian Society of Fine Art Photographers and Norwegian Visual Artist‘s Association.