The Human Angle

View all the works by Georg Oddner at the auction

For Georg Oddner, photography was about seeing – experiencing the world and being inspired by the compositions of life itself. "As a photographer, everything is a motif," he said. But he also said: "It's not just seeing it but also formulating it so that you achieve a relationship with what you see."

Student of the Legendary Richard Avedon

The quote comes from the film “Närvärende” (Presence) made in 2001 by the Swedish filmmaker and Oddner's close friend Jan Troell. Here Oddner talks about his more than 50 years as a photographer. In 1950, he went to the US as a jazz drummer and returned home as a photographer a few years later – after having studied with the legendary fashion photographer Richard Avedon. He was among the first group of tourists who visited the Soviet Union after the Second World War, and in 1968 he experienced Vietnam, where both life and the people were caught up in the torrent of war.

Declining an Offer from the Magnum Community

Oddner was in many ways a child of the documentary tradition and Photographic Modernism that had a great influence on the artform from the 1930s and onwards. Odder was inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson's decisive moment theories and was even offered to become part of the prestigious Magnum association for photography, which Cartier-Bresson founded in 1947. Oddner, however, declined the offer.

"The photograph is linked to reality," he says in Troell's film. But, Oddner says, there are many realities. He was attracted to the artistic potential of the photograph. He felt that this potential was the prerequisite for empathy towards other people, and therefore completely fundamental for the human being: "If art had not existed, we would not know anything about ourselves".

A Shared Humanity

"You have to be involved in other people and be engaged in other people's emotions before you can take pictures," he says. And regardless of where in the world he took his pictures, it was not the exotic he wanted to put on display, but rather the similarities between us as human beings.

According to his friend, the author Klaus Rifbjerg, Oddner was so immersed in his work that he became his photographs: "When he photographs others, he also photographs himself, his own traumas, his own mood, his own melancholy," Rifbjerg writes in the catalogue for Oddner's solo exhibition “The subjective objectivity” at Louisiana in 1984.

The human being and humanity are therefore a central part of Oddner's work - even the images that do not include human beings, but nature, stones and trees, often assume human forms in his images. They become thighs, bosoms, arms and veins. They are linked to reality, but Oddner also creates new "realities" in them. He worked more specifically with this approach to photography late in his career, where he created photographic settings with dried plants to give them a new lease on "life." The works at this auction are primarily from the first part of his career.

Enjoy and Bid Online

You can enjoy the many works by Georg Oddner on bruun-rasmussen.dk now and until 22 August. You can already now place a bid via the website. If you want to experience the photographs up close, then they can be viewed at our department on Baltikavej in Copenhagen's Nordhavn on Monday, 21 August and Tuesday, 22 August between 10 AM to 5 PM.