About
Axel Bernstorff is a Danish Irish art photographer, who calls the Irish countryside
his home, but is hardly ever there.
With an idiosyncratic painter mother, a meticulous and glacial bonsai gardening
father, his influences had a beginning bathed in light and form, structure and narrative.
Applied from within was a native curiosity, and interest in the human condition, both the
beautiful and the harsh.
There is a rawness, energy and honesty in his work, which calmly co-exists with the
natural beauty found within his subjects.
His work, primarily shot on black and white film, using medium and large
format cameras, centres around the rich characteristics and narratives that
exist in both human and plant forms.
He explores the idiosyncrasies and uniqueness of Polynesian inked faces,
the undulating lines of a nude, gnarled and twisted trunks of ancient
Pugliese olive trees ....
Over the past twenty years Bernstorff has also contributed to many of the worlds
leading publications and magazines. His fashion, portrait and travel stories have featured
in Vogue, Vanity Fair, Traveller, How to Spend It, Elle and many others. He shot Ivanka
Trump for Tatler, his Alexander McQueen portrait featured in the V&A's highest grossing
exhibition "Savage Beauty". Others Bernstorff has worked with include Vivienne Westwood,
Rosamund Pike, the great Amitabh Bachchan, Gordon Cheung, vertically rising Flossy Pugh
and others.
His work is held in a number of private collections around the world.
Work also held by
Christophe Guye Galerie, Zurich, Switzerland.
Tanya Baxter Contemporary, London.
Two projects already underway, Olives and Tattoos, have a strong connection for
Bernstorff as by extension there is a parallel narrative, and application dealing with
the human condition, that is indelibly linked within both these series. (more to come)