Mette Sandbye is a professor in photography studies at the Department of Modern Culture, Institute of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. Since her master’s thesis on American staged photography ("Det iscenesatte fotografi," Politisk Revy 1992) and her PhD project Monuments, Time, and Memory in Photography (Politisk Revy, 2001), Mette Sandbye has been engaged in a continuous and comprehensive investigation of photography as both a representation and a medium, artistically, culturally, and in relation to everyday life. She has written numerous books and articles and was the editor of the first comprehensive Danish history of photography (Dansk Fotografihistorie, Gyldendal 2004).
In recent years, her work has focused particularly on photography in the broader cultural-historical field and everyday life culture, including family photo albums from the 1960s and 1970s with Danish, American, and Japanese material. Her focus has been on aesthetics, materiality, social exchange, communication, and both personal and collective storytelling. She has also worked on female photographer culture in the Nordic countries from 1860-1920 as part of a joint Nordic research project. In the project “In the Shadow of War,” she will explore photography as a means of conveying and interpreting war in Denmark and the Nordic region, in light of the current war in Ukraine and also during the Cold War, ranging from press and documentary photography to art photography.
