The luminous paintings of the renowned nineteenth-century Danish artist, Vilhelm Hammershøi diffuse an air of calm and serenity, mystery and wonder. In many of his most celebrated works, it looks as though the artist has laboured to paint almost nothing at all. However, in that nothing, one sees what a world of visual sensation he explores. The painting, Dust motes dancing in the Sunbeams (1900), presents a seemingly empty room in the artist’s own residence; an apartment in a seventeenth-century building in the Christianshavn district of Copenhagen. There are no people, no furniture, no decorative refinements – simply muted-grey, panelled walls and the slanted rays of sunlight gliding through window panes to cast an alignment of light and shadow on the bare wooden floor.

The longer one studies the painting, the more one sees it as a formal arrangement of squares and rectangles structured by the window and its panes, by the door and its inset panels, and by the panelling on the wainscot and walls. It is the underlying abstraction of the composition that gives the picture it’s feeling of stillness and stability.

When looking at a photograph by Keld Helmer-Petersen, it is tempting to draw a parallel with Hammershøi’s paintings. Both share the sparse, geometric approach to built environments, and capture the abstractions, patterns and formal compositional possibilities in the landscape. There is something deeply intriguing about the way both the painter and the photographer use their vision to impose an order on the subject; the precise way the subject is framed, the clarity of the image and the interplay between horizontal and vertical planes. In his photographs, Helmer-Petersen moves stealthily through man-made environments demonstrating a remarkable ability to read astutely the contours, shapes and forms as encountered. His photographs have a highly considered, linear, even sculptural quality.

Keld Helmer-Petersen published his groundbreaking book 122 Colour Photographs in 1948. Set against Danish photography’s dominant interest in romantic pictorialism, he had already taken note of emerging abstract tendencies that had come to Denmark through the influence of the Bauhaus, as well as the work of American photographers such as Stieglitz, Strand and Weston. Yet, his artistic influences are also to be found among abstract modernist painters, in the form of the Russian Constructivism of Malevich and Rodchenko.

The ability to abstract everyday objects, patterns and textures through his particular way of framing colour, surface and form is evident throughout Helmer-Petersen’s continuing career as a photographer. The subjects – warehouses, huts, chimneys, drainpipes, benches and signs – are framed within the rectangle of the picture as dynamic lines and quiescent surfaces. In his book Fragments of a City, the modest is transformed into the monumental. Along with two-dimensional surfaces, there are spaces with complex perspectives and deep shadows – the geometry of the deserted streets in these cityscapes resonate inaudibly with the work of Hammershøi.

The legacy of this work on the subsequent generation of Danish photographers cannot be overstated. Per Bak Jensen, for instance, embarked on his career with the exhibition Den Gådefulde By (The Enigmatic City) at Copenhagen’s Galleri Gari in the late 1980’s. The show consisted of a series of black-and-white photographs, taken with a large-format camera, of scenes around the city’s parks, squares, museums and monuments. Yet, like his forebears, the places he fixed on were disserted, still and alienated. The invisible aspects of the built environment were re-presented in an estranged and mysterious light.

For Bak Jensen, as with Helmer-Petersen, photography is a means of construing the world. By focusing on everyday places and subjects that are often overlooked he points to the corners of life we tend to ignore, for example, the peripheral areas of the city; the undergrowth and angels of Den Gådefulde By or the worksites and motorways in Fotografi Some Ritual (Photography as a Ritual). However, the way in which Bak Jensen isolates the subject from its everyday context is altogether different from that of Helmer-Petersen’s approach; pure abstraction is puts to use photography’s expressive qualities with the aim of capturing the being of places – without ever foregrounding their metaphorical presence.

These qualities differentiate the photographers from the painter, and they root their practice more specifically in documentary photography. Photography enables them to observe and record faithfully what they see, but also to create harmony and to bring into sharp focus objects and relationships that might otherwise remain unseen. Through the camera lens, there is a particular interplay between light and shadow, distance and proximity that transcends any fixed and literal reading of the landscape. It is about the exchange between reality, image and idea – and it has the potential to provide a greater truth than we are generally able to comprehend.

Many of Bak Jensen’s younger contemporaries and former students have exploited and explored the expressive qualities of photography in new and radical ways. Erik Steffensen, for instance, has employed the aesthetics of blurring and the possibilities it offers to create a short circuit between the trivial and the esoteric, often saturated with bizarre colours. But, as Mikkel Bogh has written, “the basic sense remains; the spiritual is right in front of us.” Objects contain the infinite.

What we see in the work of these Danish photographers is a perceptiveness that is, arguably, part of a Nordic sensibility – formal, serene, metaphysical and beautiful. In this way, they are constituent of a wider continuity or tradition of visual representation in Scandinavia. Yet, notions of influence and impact of one medium on another are notoriously difficult to quantify. The point, then, is not to try to measure the impact their work has had on the history of photography as an art form in Denmark. It is, rather, to admire the remarkable way in which these photographers have themselves created it.