Tom Sandberg is not afraid of abstraction: it has to be here, as a component of how the world fits together. But the mysterious quality of his apparently simple pictures is far too literate to elicit a mere “What’s that?” The enigma is something of a metaphor—Sandberg has a very careful and dedicated way of looking that is by normative experience quite uncanny. In the inventory of his work, we might be hard pressed to find anything we haven’t had a look at before; and yet everywhere he puts his lens he renders the unmistakable sense that we are now seeing in a way that we usually don’t. Does he have a great eye? Sure, but the ineffable quality of his work is neither evidentiary nor visionary; it is, instead, essentially the effect of an obsessive fascination with those elements of photography in which subtlety can play out with infinite complexity. Sandberg’s art is not a product of experience; it is a process of experiencing. His choice of subject is inherently eclectic—sometimes immensely vast, sometimes intimately small; the real drama is a visual dialogue on the nature of perception. The language—honed by craft—is very much about photography. bye.
