On March 10, Kim Hart died in Oslo, Norway, where he lived most of his life. He was born in New Britain, Conn., on August 29, 1939 and as a young man spent summers in Harthaven with his grandparents. He is survived by his wife Randi, his two children Niklas and Kaja, his granddaughter Kornelia and his brother Val Hart.

Kim was my first cousin, but he was more like a brother. He is difficult to describe. If I think of colors, I see green, lots of green. If music, I hear something classical, maybe Peer Gynt Suite and perhaps a little Coltrane and Willie Nelson. If I consider beverages, Kim was beer — good beer — but definitely not a martini. He was also dungarees and tweed, rumpled tweed. Anyone considering Kim will also think of the famous Einstein formula, E=MC2. Energy and mass squared. That’s him. If Kim was awake, he was moving, and he could move fast and long. He was a wad of muscle.

Kim’s father loved to ski and he took Kim with him when he was young. From then on, Kim was in the mountains whenever it snowed. During his life, he skied the best peaks in the world and he loved to travel cross-country. He tried out for the American Olympic biathalon team — learning to shoot at targets and ski long distances. He didn’t make it, but he wasn’t disappointed. Trying hard was enough. Getting strong. Being disciplined.

Kim’s life motto was “keep it simple.” It was partly a reaction to the overcomplicated consumer society he saw all around him, but it was more than that. If your life was simple, you were free. Free to act, to move, to see, to think.

If you were Kim’s friend, you were his friend for life. If you were family, he would care for you and love you forever. If you were a stranger, he would assume you would soon be a friend.

Kim was older so he was always blazing a trail for Val and me — the first to date girls and go to college and to travel out of the United States. The trail he blazed was often intimidating. He played rugby, for example, which unlike American football was played without padding and demanded that you hurl your body at your opponent in ways that seemed suicidal. He liked to hike up the sides of mountains. He was a top student. Kim chose to go to The Gunnery — a private high school in Washington, Conn, — known for the ideals imparted by its founder, Frederick William Gunn: intellectual strength, moral courage, physical rigor, and character. I learned from Wikipedia that Gunn was a disciplinarian with a flair for reinforcing his points: students who engaged in fisticuffs were forced to sit in each other’s laps for 30 minutes; if you used foul language you were asked to lecture to a herd of cows without using the same word twice; a restless class interrupter was told to run around the church blowing a horn at each corner until he was fatigued enough to sit still. The schools ideals became Kim’s and it seems like the kind of idiosyncratic place that Kim would have liked.

Kim was born into an affluent American family and he was somewhat embarrassed by his relative wealth and by American consumer society. “You were an anti-snob,” his son Niklas said of him at the memorial service in Oslo. “There are many of those. But you were an anti-snob in a non-snobby fashion. On our kayak trips you often wore a pink cap that you found floating in the open sea. Your nose was white from thick layers of sunscreen, and on each side of your sunglasses you put small strips of tape to keep the sun rays out. It was practical that way. You repaired a 15-year-old ski suit with a computer mouse pad. Not to show that you were an anti-materialist, but because it was practical to have something soft on your hip when leaning against a tree to keep the camera steady while taking pictures. When I was young and immature, I was embarrassed by things like that. When I grew up, I realized that I had the coolest dad in the whole world.”

One of Kim’s first loves was language. He loved the different sounds of French and Italian and Greek and German and Spanish. He also liked what they represented — different ways of thinking and seeing the world. He enjoyed talking with people and to do that, if you intended to travel, you needed to know lots of languages. So at an early age he set out to learn them by living in the countries where they were spoken.

Kim spent much of his youth searching for the right place to settle — in Germany, England, France and then in Norway, where he discovered his home. Norwegians were appropriately unostentatious and the country was beautiful and unspoiled and open. The women also were beautiful and intelligent and without guile. When I first visited him in Oslo in 1967, I could see why Kim was attracted to Norwegian girls — particularly when I met his wife-to-be, Randi.

When he first moved to Norway, Kim lived in a rented room on Niels Juels gate in the home of a Norwegian family. The room was tiny. It had a desk, a chair and a bed. He had some cameras and some books. He introduced me to Knut Hamsun and other Norwegian authors. We went to Holmenkollen and we watched a cross-country ski race. We met girls. We drank beer. I have a picture of him at Holmenkollen in which he is running toward me, grinning, beer in hand, with a very tall policeman right behind him about to grab him by the collar. The two of us had done some minor, good-natured prank that aroused the officer’s attention. As I recall it, we were let off with a warning.

We went to Vigeland Park where Kim delighted in showing me the erotic sculptures and we went to the Munch museum to see The Scream. We went to Kunstnernes Hus to meet photographers and artists. At that time, I had no way of knowing that Kim would live in Norway for the rest of his life.

Kim taught me to ski cross-country by taking me on a trip from Rondane to Lillehammer across glaciers and high snow deserts. On the first day, we set out from a comfortable lodge. Soon the snow began to fall and we couldn’t see more than 60 feet all around us. I expected we would return to the lodge but we kept on. Kim navigated by compass and a map that he examined from time to time. I trusted him — I had to — but I wondered if he really knew what he was doing. “Don’t worry,” he told me, “if we get lost all we do is dig a hole in the snow and light a candle and stay up all night and in the morning we’ll surely find the hut.” I was not comforted by that explanation. The hut was 15 miles away in the gloom. We skied for eight hours, mostly without seeing much, when suddenly the snow stopped and I saw we were descending into a slight valley and ahead of us, a mile or so away, was the hut. After that first night I would have followed him anywhere.

During the winter, Kim was almost daily astride a pair of skis in the mountains above Oslo. “Calm, cool, natural, exciting — and always so alive,” remembers Olav Harlem, an officer of Skiforeningen (the Association for the Promotion of Skiing). “He would tell about his trips through the woods with enthusiasm, passing on ideas about new tracks or paths — often in the middle of nowhere — often difficult to carry through. Then he would be off again on another trip with his dog and his camera. Always casually dressed with loads of wool and a small silk scarf around the neck! Ready for new impressions and experiences. The members of Skiforeningen have had the pleasure of sharing his experiences through texts and photos in our magazine Snø & Ski. Kim’s huge contribution will live on and we will remember him as a straightforward man with his heart in the right place.”

“You showed me a different world,” Niklas said about his father. “You showed me that the 17th of May (the Norwegian National day) did not have to be celebrated with a tricolor bow-tie and ice cream as everyone else did, but with a bowie knife and grilled pork chops by a little lake in the forest outside of Oslo. You always knew a secret spot away from the main path. That was where you took me.”

I invited Kim to come to Italy to work on a National Geographic expedition to help excavate a Roman shipwreck that foundered in a storm off the coast. Kim soon became the expedition’s chief diver (though he learned to use scuba on the job) because of his athletic ability. Most of us could free dive to 40 feet or so and do some useful work there, but Kim could easily go to 80 and stay down for a long time. He took a lot of photographs and they were published in a 1969 article in National Geographic magazine. Kim photographed all over the world, specializing in outdoor images in places that were hard to get to. He was a member of the famous Black Star agency in New York and Samfoto in Norway and a half dozen or so others.

“Where the other fathers wore a tie, you had a camera,” Niklas recalled, “and where the other fathers wore a belt, you had another camera. Taking pictures was not only a job. It was a way of looking at the world, a way of living in it. Usually, you found the picture you wanted but I am not so sure that you realized that the best picture was you.”

I often wondered why Kim did not exhibit his photographs — they were good enough for any gallery. But, I think Niklas is right, taking pictures was mostly a way for him to engage with the world — and that was enough. It was better to send the photographs to his agents than to spend time in a gallery — there was so much more out there to see.

In the fall of 2008, Kim visited Val and me and our families in Maine and on the Vineyard. It was a blessing that he did. My lawn got raked, the basement was totally cleaned out and a pile of rotten wood ended up at the dump. I always got things done when Kim was around.

“To us you were invincible,” Niklas said about Kim. “You were a rock that couldn’t tumble over. Yet you tumbled. But you shall never be gone. You will always be with us. We will always think about you, talk about you, learn from you and love you.”

To learn more about Kim please go to samlow.com/KimHart.