TOM SANDBERG

Tom Sandberg, Untitled, 2004.

Afterimage by Linnea Syversen:

I find myself drawn to images that carry an ambiguity—a kind of visual dissonance. A story only half-told. Something has happened, and the image holds that space open. I think of Tom Sandberg’s photograph of a child with their head buried in the sand. That quiet tension, that sense of something just beyond reach.

There is a photograph I keep returning to—an image by Hans Olav Forsang from his Human Tonic series. A white horse. A picture that stays with me. It is visually beautiful, yet, at the same time, unsettling. The first time I saw it, I stood still for a long time. My eyes were drawn to the horse’s eye. It looked as if it had been sewn shut or was simply missing, leaving me with many questions. Later, I learned that the horse was blind after an accident, but at the time, I didn’t know. I just stood there, thinking.

Hans Olav Forsang, from his Human Tonic series, 2017.

I have often reflected on how we humans make decisions for animals when they are injured or ill. We are the ones in power who define what a worthy life is. We speak on behalf of their silence. Perhaps this horse was perfectly fine, but in the photograph, its ears are pinned back, its nostrils flared—signs that can indicate distress. Maybe it was frightened, or maybe it was just a fleeting moment of tension. Or maybe that moment of tension was simply that—a moment. We don’t know. And that’s precisely why the image stays with me. It doesn’t give answers. It asks.

Photographs claim to capture truth, but what they offer is always just a fragment—a frozen frame that conceals as much as it reveals. They can show us reality, but not its entirety. That thought lingers with me: how quick we are to interpret what we see through the lens of our own emotions and assumptions.

This makes me think about how we perceive the unfamiliar—a disability, an injury, something outside our usual experience. We want to understand, to categorize. But there are things that resist such clarity. We project our own emotions onto what we see and what we know, but we don’t always see the full picture. Life is given, and while some can shape it, others must simply take it as it comes and as it has been given. To me, the photograph becomes more than an image of a horse. It becomes a quiet meditation on power and vulnerability. here is something about black and white. I love color—it’s a cliché to say—but perhaps black and white strips away some of the noise. It forces us to confront what is, without distraction.