Fracture visions. Urban and Architectural Representation in Keld Helmer-Petersen’s fragments of a city

Abstract

In the post-war period a heterogeneous group of photographers articulate a new photographic approach to the city as motive in a photographic language that combines intense formalism with subjective vision. This paper analyses the photobook Fragments of a City published in 1960 by Danish photographer Keld Helmer-Petersen. The book is a pioneering example of this post-war tendency and yet it has not been analysed or presented academically before. In the paper I examine how the book forms a new mode of representation that balances between abstraction and realism and how this has an influence on both questions of representation and perception.