Two striking exhibitions for summer: Henriette Sabroe Ebbesen & Bruce Gilden
As summer approaches, Fotografiska Tallinn unveils two strikingly different yet equally compelling exhibitions, transforming the museum’s third floor into a vibrant intersection of artistic perspectives. Opening on May 23rd, the solo exhibitions by Henriette Sabroe Ebbesen and Bruce Gilden invite visitors to navigate two contrasting visual worlds: one steeped in illusion and dreamlike distortion, the other grounded in the raw immediacy of street life.
Danish contemporary photo and video artist Henriette Sabroe Ebbesen — who also holds a medical degree — draws from both science and art to create imagery that distorts reality and stimulates the senses. Her works — visually rich, psychologically layered — are like small-scale experiments that explore how the human body, mind, and world might be reimagined through the eye of the beholder.
Ebbesen’s solo exhibition Kaleidoscope is a dreamlike exploration of the boundary between the real and the imagined. Through the use of mirrors and reflective surfaces — deliberately avoiding AI and digital manipulation — she constructs carefully composed illusions that play with space, light, and perception.
Right beside Kaleidoscope, another world unfolds. American street photography legend Bruce Gilden presents Why These? — an unflinching portrait series that offers a raw, intimate look at individuals from the margins of society. Gilden’s signature style — close, direct, and unapologetically confrontational — brings into focus people and moments often ignored, obscured, or overlooked.
His lens captures subjects many might find unsettling, risky, or outside conventional notions of beauty. Yet his bold, empathetic approach reveals a deep human truth, tracing the contours of joy and grief, desire and despair, vitality and vulnerability.
“A good street picture will smell of the street,“ says Gilden. His ability to connect with those he photographs, often from elusive or misunderstood communities, has made him a defining voice in contemporary photography.
“There is an urgency in Gilden's images — moments captured with extraordinary precision, straight from the street. This exhibition doesn’t just ask for attention, it demands it. You can’t walk past it unaffected. Henriette Sabroe Ebbesen’s work brings a different kind of intensity — an elegant manipulation of perception that borders on the magical.”
Header: Port-au-Prince, Haiti. 1990 © Bruce Gilden