"Why what was not created to satisfy the eye, motivated only by pure function, is now so interesting to watch?"
Photographer Dag Thorenfeld has experimented with different photographic genres throughout his career: portraits, advertising photography and art photography. The exhibition Apothekernes Laboratorium at Shoot Gallery in Oslo introduces the public to another of Dag's interests: industrial photography. In 2015, before it was demolished, the Norwegian photographer documented the status of the pharmacy laboratory in Hoff, near the Norwegian capital.
The walls covered with white tiles in the gallery, a former car garage, are the ideal background for Dag’s aseptic and impersonal images. At the entrance the provocative sentence written by the scientist Erling Dokk Holm, who comments on Dag's work in a book published by the publishing house Press, quotes: why what was not created to satisfy the eye, motivated only by pure function, is now so interesting to watch?
Walking through the three rooms of the gallery you will notice that no image shows any human presence. Among photographs of metal pipes and disused machinery, some images recall through the writing the presence of those who were in charge of "dialoguing" with these objects: the photograph "Mississippi Fermentat" derives its name from the phrase on the container that indicates the nature of the substance in it, the same eloquence is also present in the work "Gass fulle", while another one shows two red signs affixed to the wall that communicate the function of the two buttons below.
The absence of staff makes both sentences and spaces devoid of any function. The yellow faucet affixed to a blue metal wall, the steel table illuminated by four windows and the countless compositions of pipes, turn into metallic still lives once fundamental parts of a perfect machine now abandoned. By closely "portraying" the individual elements, the photographer treats them as aesthetic objects, as beautiful objects. The ingenious interlocking of pipes, or the symmetrical arrangement, the shininess and smoothness thus become the qualities of a space that lost his purpose.
Dag's photographic art highlights the desire to document the stratification of functions and meanings of an urban space and, at the same time, reveals the fascination of the photographer for a place that has lost its identity forever.