The Niels Bohr Institute turns 100 next year.
On this occasion, the institute's artist in residence, Rikke Raben, and photographer Anne Prytz Schaldemose with breathtaking photos and collages, created a magnificent work that has recently been published on Strandberg's publishing house.
Peter Høeg has written the text for the book.

Both photographs and collages are simultaneously sensory-rich and deep stories. Anne Prytz Schaldemose can see the world through his camera in a way that opens up immediately invitingly. Each of the images from Niels Bohr Institute is what we would call immediately visually satisfying.

And then it's as if the images, when you linger on them, open inward towards the depth: There are so many friendly open doors in the images, there are so many discreet but information-rich juxtapositions of pregnant scientists, warm colors, shamanistic masks and formulas and warnings about radioactivity and rock posters and blackboards full of integrals.

In the same and at the same time completely different way, Rikke Raben's collages of black and white photos from the history of the institute, Bohr motifs on banknotes and stamps and quote mosaics from Bohr's works are not only fascinating historical documentation. The collage's possibilities for writing a subtext, a discreet, sometimes almost hidden narrative, are subtly exploited: In close-up pictures, Bohr is seen bending towards a foreign researcher and a child, respectively, and Bohr's cordial presence is the same in both situations.
In a low-key and refined manner, the images show the patriarch Bohr, the playboy Bohr, the spiritually open Bohr and Bohr as the concerned opinion maker, even bordering on an international politician. In the press release, the publisher writes in more detail that: 'Rikke Raben has selected b/w photos from the Niels Bohr Archive, and with her background in sculpture portraits, she has generally merged b/w and color photos, etc., in the combinations and sequences that together form the visual portrait of the Niels Bohr Institute in the book.'‘

Peter Høeg's text raises and examines the question of what the relationship is today between quantum physics and ethics, between natural science and art, and what has become of Bohr's interest in spirituality.

This is not an ordinary coffee table book. It is a great story about the 30 years that shook physics and about a location (the Niels Bohr Institute) that  The Weekend Newspaper these days has been called 'Denmark's most important address'.

Tomorrow we will bring here on the blog an excerpt from Peter Høeg's foreword to Unity of Knowledge.