Blind Spots gathers photographic work by Balder Olrik, an artist who began as a painter in the 1980s, became part of the pioneering digital-media and internet community of the 1990s with a focus on behavioural science, stopped his artistic career in 1998 to concentrate on digital projects, and returned to art-making in 2014 with photography as his primary medium. Born in 1966 into a family of scientists in the Copenhagen area, where he still lives and works, Olrik brings an unusual formation to the camera. Published by Hartmann Books in 2018, this is the first book devoted to his photographic work.
The project proceeds from a straightforward but slippery question: what are we actually looking at when we look? Drawing on Daniel Kahneman’s account of the brain’s perceptual systems, Olrik treats recognition as a kind of shortcut — once we have placed a scene, we tend to stop examining it. He answers this by stripping context-specific elements out of the frame, so that familiar environments arrive unfamiliar, and the act of orientation that normally takes a split second is held open a little longer. The book is described as a study of auto-perception: less a record of places than an inquiry into how we see them and what we unconsciously decline to see.
Anna Ebbesen contributes a text to the volume, which is published in English and Danish. At 120 pages and 63 illustrations, with a 25.5 × 33 cm page and a hardcover binding with open spine and dust jacket, the book gives the images room to work at scale. The design is integral rather than incidental — an open spine invites the sequence to be handled and read as an object, not just viewed.
The photographs invite attention because of the argument they carry, not merely their subjects. For a collector interested in contemporary photography that engages perception, cognition and behavioural science, this is a considered entry point into Olrik’s work — the first substantial gathering of a practice that is still relatively unfamiliar in book form, and a volume whose intentions are clarified by its essay and its editorial care.
