“As a water droplet belongs to the ocean, so does the moment belong to eternity. One takes a picture to contemplate and retain a fragment of time, an instant to return to.” The words are those of Georg Oddner. The writer Jacques Werup has put it like this: “Georg Oddner’s sensitivity for the decisive moment is so well developed that it almost gives him a sense of frustration that the camera – the technology – so seldom manages to keep up and perceive what the eye perceives. This disappointment paradoxically becomes something fruitful, a constant search, not for the decisive moments but for the eternal moments, those which are continually happening.” Georg Oddner is a photographer but he has been much more as well, including a jazz musician (according to Sten Broman “probably one of Europe’s best percussionists”) and a tennis player. Rhythm and coordination form a successful partnership: the ear listens when the hand has to move the drumstick on the drum; the eye finds the ball and the tennis racket hits cleanly in the right fraction of a second. A few years ago, the writer Ingemar Leckius wrote of Oddner that “on the whole there is something mysterious in the pictures of great photographers, works which have often been created intuitively, perhaps in a thousandth of a second, but whose composition is still the fruit of the experiences of an entire life.” Georg Oddner’s photographic career stretches over five decades. He has photographed everything and everyone with all kinds of techniques and for all kinds of clients. He has an endless abundance of variation and a limitless world of motifs. He himself has said: “Everything is a motif, it is just a matter of formulating it so that one creates a relationship with the motif.” This relationship is built upon reflection and humanism, on respect, a desire for integrity and also human closeness. All this penetrates his pictures and makes him unique as a photographer. From this enormous amount of material – more than 670,000 exposures – a selection has been made for the exhibition at Malmö Konsthall and Malmö Museums. Many of the pictures have previously been shown in exhibitions or published in books, magazines and newspapers, but many others have never been exhibited before. Georg Oddner was born in Stockholm in 1923. For the past 50 years he has lived and worked in Malmö – and the whole world.