Tormod Granheim

Tormod's journey into art began with a childhood dream of photographing skis. This dream led him to Chamonix, where he initially worked behind the camera, but soon became captivated by the steep lines of the mountains. Collaboration with climber Tomas Olsson and photographer Fredrik Schenholm culminated in an expedition to Mount Everest, where Tormod was the first to complete a ski descent of the North Face.

Through expeditions and lectures for businesses, the Norwegian Armed Forces, and NATO, he has lived closely with the mountains for decades. After Everest, new projects followed – including becoming the first Nordic climber to ascend all 82 peaks above 4000 meters in the Alps, an achievement that earned him the title of Adventurer of the Year. As an athlete and adventurer, he has always carried his camera, and his work has been published in National Geographic, three books, and reports in more than 25 countries.

When he left competitive life behind, he turned his full attention to photography. The high mountains became an artistic motif, freed from the time pressure that expeditions always entailed. His works have been exhibited at the Munch Museum, in several galleries, and are included in public collections, such as the Bærum Municipality art collection.

In his artistic practice, he explores the duality of the mountain: the timelessly beautiful and the merciless, the alluring and the threatening. His photographs are both documentary and impressionistic – created in the encounter between the landscape, memory, and post-production. In this way, he seeks to convey the mountains' silence, darkness, and poetry as a mirror of human experience.

After-effects

After-effects is an exploration of transitions: from sport to art, from performance to process, from documentation to interpretation.

The project is based on an ongoing black-and-white photographic work that has already found its way into exhibitions and art collections. At the same time, it expands by placing newer works in dialogue with older material from Tormod's time as an active climber and skier. The archive's analog and digital color images become a resonance chamber for experiences that still live on – while also offering new perspectives on the landscape's continuous transformation under ice, cold, erosion, and time.

In the field, he works documentarily, but in post-production, a more poetic expression emerges. Conversions, editing, and printing processes transform the motifs into visual narratives that encompass both external and internal experiences. In this way, the project seeks to answer the questions: How is one's gaze shaped over time? How do old images gain new meaning in encounters with new ones? And what does it mean to carry a landscape forward in memory – and in art?

After-effects is thus both a retrospective and a movement forward: an attempt to translate experience into image, and to open up to new motifs, media, and ways of seeing.