Magnus Skrede comes from a background and family of music and arts in Norway. At a young age he performed as boy soprano soloist in professional contexts and as musical circus artist on prime time national television (NRK), effectively financing his first cameras. At age 18 he traveled by himself in East Africa for several months, resulting in his first published travel article from Kilimanjaro in the Scandinavian travel magazine Vagabond. This is where he discovered the passion for photographing human relations. In 2015 he exhibited his work from Africa at the Trygve Lie Gallery, New York.
For the past 15 years he has worked extensively with stage photography and illustrational projects that have been internationally acknowledged.
"An explicit modern touch was added by Magnus Skrede's black-and-white photographs of the lovers"
- Yehuda Shapiro, OPERA NOW, February 2017
"Det visuelle gjenspilte musikken og dramaets sanselighet, spesielt i sluttscenen når de spilte mot Magnus Skredes sensuelle fotografier av de elskende"
- Annabel Guaita, Bergens Tidende 2016
"Tolkningen treffer godt verkets musikalske stemning."
- REBECKA AHVENNIEMI, SCENEKUNST 2014
"Photographer Magnus Skrede witnessed the toppling of apartheid firsthand as a child living on a South African Republic farm in the early 1990s. Ever since, Skrede has taken a special interest in prejudices, assumptions and ideas about the continent he partly grew up in – Africa – as a unified geographical place («the country of Africa»), and its connotations of misery, poverty and backwardness. His work reveals the people, objects and landscapes as sites of hope. It also challenges us to adopt the same attitude."
- Thor-Erik Fjellvang, curator at Trygve Lie Gallery, New York City 2015