Since the turn of the last millennium, Copenhagen’s gallery scene has exploded. New galleries with a high professional and international standard open every year. Even the financial crisis and the following recession have not diminished the scene. As I write this text, five of Copenhagen’s ‘Top Ten’ contemporary art galleries are exhibiting Danish art photography: Joachim Koester at Gallery Nicolai Wallner, Trine Søndergaard at Martin Asbæk Gallery, Mads Gamdrup at Nils Stærk, Thomas Bangsted at Tom Christoffersen and Elisabeth Toubro at Michael Andersen. Ten years ago, this would have been inconceivable but it points to the fact that photography is now integrated into Copenhagen’s art scene. It is recognised, accepted, highly developed and multifaceted. It is even considered ‘hip’.

The five exhibitions mentioned above cover a wide range of uses of the medium revealing the variety of Danish art photography today: text-combined conceptualism (Koester), highly experimental formal-abstract practice (Gamdrup), digitally manipulated, largeformat landscapes (Bangsted), a kind of ‘postmodern pictorialism’ (Søndergaard) and a sculptor exhibiting photographic documentation of her own politicised performances, in the tradition of much 1970s feminist art (Toubro).

Ten years ago art photography was mostly presented at specific institutions for photography: The Museum of Photographic Art in Odense, (founded in 1987), The Centre for Photography in Copenhagen (opened in 1996) and The National Museum of Photography (founded in 1996 and opened in 1999). Contemporary galleries of art remained very hesitant to show photography.

In the 1970s and 1980s there were, however, many notable photographers who paved the way for the much more prominent role that photography now plays on the Danish art scene: Keld Helmer-Petersen, Tove Kurtzweil, Per Bak Jensen, Kirsten Klein, Krass Clement – to name some of the most significant. But they were often ‘ghettoised’ as photographers and rarely included in the art scene as the younger generations are today.

In 2004, the first comprehensive volume Danish History of Photography was published; an historical survey of photographic practices and genres. As the book describes, photography has been used as an art form since – at least – the beginning of the twentieth century. But there were no institutions, no market, no consciousness of the possibilities of the medium among the general public. And whereas Danish photography, especially documentary photography and conceptual avantgarde art photography, exploded in the 1960s and 1970s, it was not until the 1990s that it slowly started to be widely accepted as an art form, from practitioners such as Erik Steffensen, Mads Gamdrup, Joachim Koester, Pia Arke and, the now worldfamous, Olafur Eliasson. Though they regarded themselves as artists more than photographers, they were educated at the Royal Art Academy in Copenhagen, where photographer Per Bak Jensen’s role as teacher proved of major importance to the development and visibility of Danish art photography. The creation of the Media School at the Royal Academy was also significant in this respect. In recent decades, Danish photographers have also frequented art schools abroad in cities such as Amsterdam (Gerrit Rietveld Academy) and Glasgow (The Art Academy). In Aarhus, Denmark’s second largest city, a photographic art scene developed around the artist-run exhibition space Gallery Image that opened in 1977 and still exists. The non-commercial, artist-run Gallery for Photography (Fotografisk Galleri) in Copenhagen (that existed from 1987 until 1997) also played an important role in establishing an understanding of photography-as-art in Copenhagen. The art school Fatamorgana, in Copenhagen, fostered some of the most ambitious and interesting photographers during the 1990s, and it often worked as a pre-school to the Royal Art Academy in Copenhagen or other international art schools. The annual Copenhagen Photo Festival was founded in 2010 with the intention of presenting significant Danish and international contemporary photography in urban spaces, art and cultural institutions, galleries and schools throughout the city. It is a very inclusive festival, covering a broad range of photographic practices from reportage to art, by school children and internationally acclaimed artists.

Although, especially in Copenhagen, the photographic art scene has expanded since the late 1980s, it is still too small to identify very distinct and competing ‘schools’; postmodern staged photography, documentary and conceptual photography were strong currents in the 1990s, and still are. Although contemporary young artists such as Astrid Kruse Jensen, Thomas Bangsted, Nicolai Howalt, Trine Søndergaard and Absalon Kirkeby work (almost) exclusively with photography, many other artists use photography from time to time and on equal terms with video and other media. For example, one of Denmark’s most celebrated contemporary painters, Tal R, has produced several photo-based artistbooks, while Søren Lose, Katya Sander and Joachim Koester all combine text, video and installation with photography.

Today photography is being exhibited everywhere, reviewed in the newspapers, and acquired by collectors. In Copenhagen, it is displayed at Peter Lav Gallery (a gallery for photography) and the publicly funded institutions for photography (The National Museum of Photography and The Centre for Photography). But, it is also integrated in many other art contexts. Preparing this introduction, I called several gallery owners to ask them whether photography sells as well as painting and whether it has a large audience. While they all agreed on the second question, the answers to the first were more varied, ranging from ‘the development is extremely slow, it is still much harder to sell photography, and there is only a handful of Danish photography collectors’ to ‘yes, photography is booming these years and now sells as any other art form’. However, they all had experiences of having to explain to possible buyers why prints are sold in editions of three to five copies.

In a recent interview with an art critic in the national newspaper, Politiken, the journalist asked whether photography could be art? In 2011, Andreas Gursky’s Rhein II (1999) sold at auction for $4.3m making it the world’s most expensive photograph. But when the prestigious Danish museum of modern art, Louisiana, showcased Gursky in early 2012, it felt compelled to underline – in the catalogue, the press material and the interpretation texts on the wall – that Gursky is an artist rather than ‘an old-fashioned photographer’. Museum Director, Poul Erik Tøjner wrote, ‘to work with Andreas Gursky and his photography is to work with true visual art – it is only as an afterthought that one realises that the medium is photography’. He added, ‘it is this delving into the incomprehensible richness of details that justifies his presence at a museum of modern art’. Would Louisiana ever have written in such a way about Per Kirkeby or Anselm Kiefer, I ask myself? Politiken’s interview and Louisiana’s justification thus point to the fact that we have not yet achieved photography’s full assimilation by Danish art scene. But, as this issue of Next Level demonstrates, the foundations have been laid and remain solid.