In color and black-and-white photographs, Nicolai Howalt blurs the boundaries between abstraction and documentation, beauty and the grotesque, and life and death. He recognizes the duality of photographs as both records of reality and easily manipulated images, stating: “What we photograph, what is shown in the work, is always something concrete. . . . I would like to challenge the surface of the media and to have both a concrete and an abstract story, yet to keep ‘something’ we cannot see or perhaps fully comprehend.” Working in this spirit, Howalt has created a range of series including photographs of wrecked vehicles after car crashes, closely framed so as to render them nearly abstract; photographs of UV light rays, normally invisible to the naked eye; and, together with his longtime artistic collaborator Trine Søndergaard, poetic pictures of birds shot by hunters, captured the …