Denmark

Take the train up the coast from Copenhagen and in the store of the Louisiana Museum you can find a book on stamps. It’s not just any book, but a cloth-covered masterpiece about a Dane who turned lick-and-post drudgery into an exquisite art form. It’s deeply researched, elegantly designed, and revelatory about its subject.

That book is what Denmark is all about. Everything approaches the transcendent, whether architecture, cuisine, renewable energy, or a sea bath. Got something old that’s becoming dowdy? Then recast it in a new light, turning a church into an art gallery or a graveyard into an urban park. Everything becomes something other in the hands of a masterful people.

Leave Copenhagen for the island of Hven or Mons Klint and you’ll discover that nature has its own craftsmen in the form of plants, birds, and spiders who, in the astonishing light of late summer near the top of the world, cast their own patterns of intense beauty. The stage is entirely set against the backdrop of an infinite sea which, sometimes silver, sometimes plush velvet, sometimes powder-like, reminds us of the preciousness of this tiny bit of humanity that somehow got it all right.

Here’s my photo essay on Denmark.