A rare photographer you may wish to know

[Ulophot]

I’d like to commend to any not familiar with it, the work of a certain Finnish photographer I just discovered. His name is Kristoffer Albrecht; his site is here:

https://www.kristofferalbrecht.com/2015ndash2018.html

It has become somewhat rare for me to find for the first time a photographer whose work continues to draw me in like a book you can’t put down. I don’t claim to be familiar with many of today’s outstanding photographers, but I do look in the time available. Albrecht’s work, which I came across in Peter Fetterman‘s book, The Power of Photography, recently mentioned here, has the power of some of the great photographers of generations past, often reminding me of Strand in a certain way. His eye for composition is among the keenest I have ever seen, as both his images and printing—apparently mostly or all silver gelatin, I infer from the work on the Peter Fetterman Gallery site—convey. The printing is extraordinary; I don’t know how he does it. It appears from the grain in the images on his site, many of which show pronounced grain, that he works in 35mm and perhaps medium format, but the quality of many of the images speaks of the kind of painstaking, patient attention to detail and timing that is many times associated most with large format.

He also has a delightful sense of humor, and both formal and contextual irony weave through many of his images.

He hosts a great deal of work on his site; it’s one to be bookmarked for returning to repeatedly. Among the work, especially in a certain time period, are a number of playfully constructed still lifes. It is not for me to judge what his intention was with them, but I see them as experiments in craft, in which the interplay of elements in various planes of the image, the various parts of its space in all directions, is carefully managed with respect to depth-of-field, balance, tonality, relationship to the edges, and so forth. He is a master of complex composition and often uses small elements at the edges as counterpoint to large dynamic “fields” within the image.

At his best, his images are, in my view, on a par with any of the great photographs I know. One can only imagine the enjoyment of seeing actual prints. I will certainly be continuing my education at his site.