Like many contemporary practitioners, Ulrik Heltoft does not aspire to creating a personal style; his photographic work is wide-ranging in terms of both subject matter and aesthetics. His concerns are eclectic, his approaches divergent. Heltoft presents his ideas using photography, video and installation. However, three particular series of images from his photographic oeuvre stand out from the others. They are his White-Out series, his Voynich Botanical Studies series, and his series of faux-documentary images entitled Counted, Weighed, Divided. In the latter, individuals are depicted carrying out banal activities as if caught in ‘candid’ shots. The viewer knows they are staged – the illusion is deliberately flawed – but might still feel obliged, through a suspension of disbelief, to see them as genuine documentary images. In actual fact, there is a formula lurking behind the intentionality of these images. Heltoft came across an account of the making of a book titled Nouvelle Impressions d’Afrique by the French Surrealist writer Raymond Roussel (1877-1933). Roussel wanted some illustrations to pad-out what had turned out to be a rather lightweight book and, without meeting him, sent the artist Henri Zo (1873-1933) some bizarre and whimsical instructions outlining the required subject for each illustration to accompany his text. Following the instructions intended for Zo, Heltoft has, seventy years later, created a series of staged photographs that are pictorially faithful to Roussel’s whimsy – to the nth degree. Titles like [23] A man dropping a coin into a barrel-shaped moneybox (2005) or [52] A rambler, arm raised, and fingers outspread, dropping a pebble (still visible) down a well and seemingly straining to hear the sound of its splash (2008) might give a taste of how this surreal and seemingly pointless series works.

Heltoft’s White-Out series (1999-2008) offers a sequence of pale, bleached-out landscape images into which the viewer is required to stare penetratingly in order to make sense of the faint, almost invisible forms that only tentatively dwell there. The British photographer, Paul Graham, used a similar pictorial strategy in his American Nights (1998-2002), but his subjects were urban scenes from the southern states of America, emphasising the anonymity of the urban poor, where the bleached-out effect acted as a metaphor. Heltoft, in his series, depicts the Arctic wastes of Greenland during a blizzard and the effects, here, are neither contrived nor illusory but, on the contrary, straight documentary images of a landscape where boundaries and contrasts between land and sky are obscured during the extreme conditions of a snowstorm. The white-out here seems to carry an important message, not just about the nature of the photographic image, but also the nature of the viewing process. Any ambiguity in an image, whether it is a lack of pictorial definition or the uncertainty of subject, makes us feel bound to persevere with our interpretation of that image. The potential for vagueness in imagery is surprisingly tantalising. We experience an urge to resolve any lack of clarity, any uncertainty of meaning in these photographs. The American writer, Siri Hustvedt, recently wrote that ‘the mind is a glutton for meaning’ and Heltoft, in effect, feeds that glutton with these blanched, enigmatic delicacies.

These images are imbued with a feeling of loss. Instead of recording a moment in time, they seem to stand outside of time and, paradoxically, seem to be bathed in a subjective silence; a kind of tabula rasa, they don’t just offer the viewer a panoply of interpretations, they demand it! The ontological vacuum here is uncomfortably palpable. We don’t learn much about Greenland apart from the dominance of its icy bleakness. The uncanny predominates, and these scenarios could be stages for the Gothic fantasies of Edgar Allan Poe or H P Lovecraft. What is even more fascinating and puzzling about these images is that they seem to stand outside of the rest of Heltoft’s oeuvre, which is so much based on conceptual concerns around the question of identity. Maybe it’s our own identity that is being probed by these wan and, ultimately, melancholic images that go to make up White-Out.

In Voynich Botanical Studies (2012), Heltoft picks up on the strange imagery to be found in the botanical sketches of the fifteenth-century Voynich Manuscript – bizarre plants that don’t seem to have an earthly equivalent, leading to speculation that the manuscript was written and illustrated by some alien visitor to earth whose relationship to plants here was skewed by previous experiences, or knowledge, of a totally alien flora. Heltoft, as if to afford credibility to the Voynich botanical sketches, has created a series of plant photographs that are in diametrical opposition to the existing genre and, particularly, that well-known series of photographic plant studies by Karl Blossfeldt made in the 1920s. Heltoft’s photographs, flying in the face of orthodox practice, show these plants against a black background which tends to obscure rather than enhance their details, however, what we can make out is rather disconcerting; these plant specimens are unlike any we have ever seen. The fibre-based paper on which they are printed lend these images a quality of historical, archival credibility suggesting they are authentic documentary. They certainly appear anachronistic. As with White-Out and Counted, Weighed, Divided, Heltoft continues to tease the viewer as to the intentionality of, and the meaning conveyed by, these ultimately enigmatic photographs – apart, that is, from focusing on historical contexts. Artifice, used to both highlight and deflate historically sourced documents, seems to be a common thread, provoking uncertainty and ambivalence.