Mette Tronvoll, Norway’s queen of slow photography

Her new show, Time, presents some 90 works, mostly new and previously unseen, the result of a huge investment in, well, time. The thoughtful and softly moving series about the fishing outpost of Hidra, a picture-perfect piece in the island puzzle of a southern archipelago, were taken over several years during visits in which the artist explored the landscape and got to know, and be trusted by, the islanders. 

Tronvoll’s photographs capture enduring beauty. Trees are formed by the wind stream, snow blankets rooftops, icebergs bob in bays. It also shows the frailty of human interference: there are dilapidated boat houses, overgrown wartime defences, barbed wire encircles a tree like a noose of razor blades. Meanwhile, islanders go about their days: netting fish, manning boats. The women of Hidra chose to stay away from the camera.

Hidra is in Flekkefjord, some 50 kilometres from Kristiansand, where Tronvoll’s exhibition opens at Kunstsilo, a former grain silo on the city’s harbourside. The venue fits the subject: it too has been shaped by hard-won renewal. 

The Brutalist building, designed by Arne Korsmo in 1935, reopened in 2024 after years of lying derelict, reimagined as a museum to hold the world’s largest collection of Nordic Modernist art, an extraordinary group of paintings, photography, sculpture and ceramics assembled by Nicolai Tangen, head of the Norwegian Oil Fund. 

“I wanted to go into coastal culture. To see what that is, because I’m not a coastal person myself,” says Tronvoll, who meets me in the lighthouse-like bar on the top floor of Kunstsilo. The same cold, clear, dark waters that feature in her photographs, flow below. The museum commissioned Time.

“So, it felt natural to find a place in the area. Somebody said Hidra is a beautiful island that no one really knows. It’s too far for people from Oslo to go there. it’s really between the western part and the southern part of Norway. It’s like a crossing point.” 

The island is still, for the time being, home to a fishing community. “Real life takes place there,” she says.

Tronvoll pictures formidable terrain shaped by granite foundations, dense sopping-wet mounds of moss and weather-worn coastal oaks. Just 20 square kilometres, with a population of 500 islanders, Hidra is separated from the mainland by a short strait, yet Tronvoll conjures up an ecosystem out of sync with modernity. 

“There’s something special about islands, because they’re so self-contained. They have a life of their own and their own energy. It’s very complicated to get to know the place. There are no hotels there.” 

Tronvoll rented a cabin and set about getting to know the locals. “I had many attempts before I broke the ice. It’s all about talking and getting to know people. It’s an investment.” 

Tronvoll was born in Trondheim in 1965 and for some four decades has built a career out of such photographic investments. The complicated relationship between people and place informs much of her work, which has included series on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, the hot springs of Greenland and a commando training centre in the wintry north of Norway. In 2014 she photographed Queen Sonja of Norway, perched on the Norwegian shoreline rather than a throne.

Since the 1990s, Tronvoll has collaborated with the German master printer Dagmar Miethke to produce her characteristic large, square-format, analogue colour photographs. This stately process, married to a long period of editing selections from a vast number of original shots, creates a kind of slow photography. 

Perfecting the edit for Time, she explains, was key to discovering the patterns, rhythms and details ingrained in island life: the branches of fallen trees appear to grip the earth; wooden sheds and stone houses fragment and crumble; an islander on his deathbed resembles a rock under ferns. The pictures’ earthy palette is occasionally punctuated by the yellow and red of fishermen’s oilskins.

The Hidra pictures have been twinned with a selection of portraits, dating from the early 1990s to the present day. They echo the themes of progression and decline. Four portraits taken by Tromvoll in 1993 depict elderly women, including the artist’s grandmother, from a small village. Each is pictured against an ochre background. Tronvoll then photographed 12 young women, all friends of hers from a period living in New York. The same backcloth is used.

In 2024, she rediscovered the rolled backdrop in her storage, untouched for 31 years. She subsequently produced four new portraits of the (once) young women against the sheet. These pictures are further supplemented by several portraits of the friends with their children.

“I’m proving time, I’m visualising time,” Tronvoll says. The decades-long project has echoes of Nicholas Nixon’s Brown Sisters series, a sequence of images of four American siblings photographed annually since 1975. 

The works are all part of a larger project for Tronvoll, titled Norway in our Century, a long-term survey made possible by an artist’s stipend from the Norwegian government. The endeavour takes its inspiration from People of the 20^th Century, a photographic exploration of the lives of Germans taken by August Sander from the Weimar era to the country’s post-war reconstruction. Both photographers adopt a frank approach to portraiture, with subjects looking directly into the lens without pretence or artifice.  

Life on Hidra is hard and precarious, says Tronvoll. What happens when the present generation of fishermen die? Will another take its place? These questions are left unanswered. 

However, as Tromvoll walks me through the final gallery of Time, I’m confronted with a sequence of pictures of the wave-lashed coast – a geometry of surf and rock without figures – that suggest nature’s long game. “I can smell the ocean and the salt,” says Tronvoll. “This is prehistoric time.”

Mette Tronvoll, Time is at Kunstsilo, Kristiansand, until 25 May