Sølve Sundsbø

Sølve Sundsbø is a Norwegian photographer and filmmaker born in 1970 and based in London. He moved to London in the mid-1990s to study photography and went on to assist Nick Knight, developing a career that has moved freely between fashion editorial, advertising, portraiture, film and experimental image technology. His work has appeared in publications including Vogue Italia, i-D, LOVE, V Magazine and other international fashion titles.

Sundsbø is known for combining conventional studio craft with digital manipulation, scanning, projection, painted retouching and moving image. His commercial work has included major fashion and luxury houses, while exhibitions and independent projects have placed his images in gallery and museum contexts. His film 14 Actors Acting for The New York Times received an Emmy, and his photographic work is held in institutional collections including the National Portrait Gallery in London.

His relationship with ERDEM reaches from early collection imagery into the house’s archival self-documentation. In 2015 he photographed the tenth-anniversary portfolio of ten archive dresses worn by Guinevere Van Seenus and creatively directed by Thomas Persson. The project distilled a decade of ERDEM into a controlled studio sequence and became one of the house’s defining retrospective image projects.

Sundsbø treats fashion photography as a field for technical experimentation. Light, scanning, retouching, film and digital effects can radically alter texture or anatomy, but the image usually remains anchored by a clear graphic idea and close attention to the person in front of the camera.

His style changes from assignment to assignment, moving from polished portraiture to abstraction, distortion and highly artificial colour. This flexibility has allowed him to work across editorial, campaign, film and exhibition formats while maintaining a recognisable interest in the physical transformation of an image.

For ERDEM’s anniversary portfolio, the experimentation became restrained and archival. The repeated presence of Van Seenus and the selection of ten dresses created continuity, while lighting and photographic control allowed differences in textile, silhouette and era to remain visible across the sequence.