Norwegian-born, London-based fashion photographer and filmmaker Sølve Sundsbø has garnered respect for his open-mindedness towards new technologies like 3-D scanning and hand-painted retouching. The impressive images by the Norwegian photographer has been featured in numerous exhibitions.
Sølve Sundsbø was born in Norway in 1970 and came to London in 1995 to study photography at the London College of Printing. He left college to work as first assistant to British photographer Nick Knight.
Sundsbø first branched out into moving images in 1999, after i-D magazine’s founder and editor-in-chief Terry Jones, suggested it.
He photographed images of the Alexander McQueen archive for the catalogue of the “Savage Beauty” retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 2011.
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Same year, he was awarded an Emmy for his direction of a series of short films, shot for the website of the The New York Times Magazine. The series, 14 Actors Acting commissioned by Kathy Ryan, was acclaimed as a “new approach”, but the Norwegian photographer claims he simply “dabbles” in film.
In 2012, Sunsdbø collaborated with W magazine, creating and exhibiting an installation of his film “The Ever Changing Face of Beauty”.
Sundø has shot for publications such as Italian Vogue, Perfect, Love, V Magazine, i-D, L’Uomo Vogue and Vogue Hommes International. Among numerous exhibitions, the Vogue Photo Festival, “Beyond the Still Image”, at the Palazzo Reale in Milan in 2018 was a milestone.
Sundø’s commercial clients include Chanel, Hermès, Nike and Yves Saint Laurent and, outside the fashion world, Norwegian band Röyksopp,, Swedish group Coldplay and English Friendly Fires. They have all chosen his work for their album covers.
The artwork for the Coldplay’s album A Rush of Blood to the Head was made into a stamp by Royal Mail in 2010 to celebrate the ten most iconic album sleeve artworks from the last forty years.
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Sølve has produced stills and moving image for major fashion and beauty brands including Chanel, Armani, Cartier, Mugler, Gucci, Prada, Louis Vuitton, Hermes, and Guerlain.
Today, Sølve continues to push the boundaries of image-making, working across a range of platforms from photography to fashion film, while constantly uniting traditional, old-fashioned techniques with pioneering technologies. His artwork has been included in auctions by Phillips De Pury and is held in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Impressive Images by Norwegian Photographer, written by Tor Kjolberg
All photos (except portrait photo) © Sølve Sundsbø