One winter morning a few years ago, I left my home in the damp, icy cold for and tramped through the dirty sleet and snow to get on a plane to Copenhagen. The temperature was just around zero, that magical moment where hot and cold meet, my destination a city known for a raw winter cold immortalised by H.C. Andersen’s story about the little match girl, who froze to death in the streets. I was making a day trip to the Danish capital in order to view the first posthumous exhibition of Sandberg’s vintage prints, hitherto unseen. Vintage prints: those photographic concoctions redolent with the aura of the artist’s hand. Prints reeking of something more authentic than just a mere reproduction, this something more a kind of presence from beyond the grave, the presence of absence perhaps.

Oslo Airport that morning was dense with fog. It often is. This icy fog of a cold winter’s morning, the frozen particles of stuff, together with the grain of the tri-X 400 black and white film, make up the dense materiality of many a Sandberg photograph. The ghostly airplane hovering above the runway springs to mind.

A young man sits down next to me in the less than half-full plane, his unnecessary proximity slightly unnerving. Within minutes, his anxiety becomes palpable, his inability to cope with flying, with life, made obvious as he brings out a bottle of whisky at 07:30 in the morning. It takes one to know one I think, and I decide to get up and move, to dismiss his invitation to converse. A few rows forward, a free seat, next to the wing. 16A.

I turn to my left, my fingers tracing the oval outline of the windowsill, its white tough plastic rough to the touch like hardened skin. I notice small crystals attached to the outside pane of glass, the built-up condensation between the inner and outer glass blurring whatever is outside. A good friend’s favourite photograph by Sandberg is conjured: the outline of a person looming through just such drops of water, seen from what could be the inside of a car. It’s like this whenever I’m on a plane and my eye strays towards the window and beyond: any number of Sandberg photographs appear. The jet engines take on the look of devouring faces or hollow eyes. Layers of accumulated clouds stretch towards a horizon that seems to stay at the same distance no matter how fast or in which direction we travel. Looking across the aisle, I see a fellow traveller engaged in exactly the same pastime, the back of his head framed by the oval window. Suspended, up there, 11,000 feet above ground and with only some plastic and metal separating me from total oblivion, I jot down a line I’ve kept in mind for years from Djuna Barnes’ most famous novel Nightwood: ‘An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties’.

I’ve chewed on those words ever since I found the novel in a second-hand bookstore on Eighth Street in New York, the store itself an image, beyond time and space, its own little world of accumulated words left behind by others who were either dead or had no use for them anymore. It was a bookstore the likes of which I would prowl during those student days, enjoying the incredible thrill of coming upon things accidentally, taking chances, risking failure, rather than having whatever I want delivered to my door by Amazon. ‘An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties’ is a phrase that acts like an image: I understood it immediately, intuitively, the phrase having exactly the same effect on my mind as the effect it claims the image has. I’d be hard-pressed to explain this phrase, just like an image, but it sums up so much of what happens when I see one of Sandberg’s photographs: the space of the image not as certainty, but as an experience situated beyond the all-too-familiar space of uncertainty – a vital distinction.

This text is from the chapter We need to talk about the weather. Tom Sandberg from the book Making Worlds, Objektiv #22 by Morten Andenæs.