Cloud Nine

Norwegian master photographer Tom Sandberg's first solo exhibition in the United States -- on view at P.S.1 MoMA -- made me feel like I was walking on air. That's my groundling's take on what one expert, Yngve Kvistad, describes as the "ambiguous surfaces that do not quite reveal themselves" in Sandberg's large-format, often painterly, black & white photographs. It's not just in the "titanic, almost monochrome skyscapes" that there's "an invigorating presence of visual paradoxes" or a "tangible absence revealed." It's in the portraits, too. They show what Derrida called the "invisible interior of poetic freedom," Kvistad notes. I'll leave the technical terms to the experts and philosophers. Here's what the Sandberg exhibit did for me: It turned my eyeballs into flotation devices.