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Foto: Jim Bengston

Foto: Kåre Kivijärvi


Foto: Esko Männikkö


Foto: Jorma Puranen


Foto: Lars Tunbjörk


Foto: Ragnar Axelsson

Faces and Figures

Contemporary Scandinavian Photography

by Øivind Storm Bjerke

Photography had an early start in the Nordic countries with the contribution of the little-known Danish-Norwegian lawyer and publicist Hans Thöger Winther (1786–1851). He started experimenting with photography in the summer of 1839, inventing his own process for fixing an image on paper. He published articles on his findings in 1842 and a book in 1845. Another early photographer who is usually recognized as Scandinavian-–this time a Swede--is Carl Gustav Rejlander (1813–1875). He lived and worked in England, and little else than his name seems to connect him to Sweden. Apart from these early pioneers, few Scandinavians have managed to work their way into the annals of photography. This does not mean that photography is of little importance in the Nordic countries--here as elsewhere photography been a major instrument of documentation in all fields of society and science. Not least has photography played a major role in producing an image of the Nordic countries--especially Norway--as an exotic and tantalizing tourist goal. Norway has a great tradition of landscape photography. Anders Beer Wilse (1865–1949), the foremost Norwegian landscape photographer of the period 1900-50, started out making surveillance photography in the U.S. in the late 1880s, and lived in Seattle from 1890 to 1900. The website of the Seattle Museum of History and Industry offers an online exhibition of the work made in Seattle by Wilse, who is by far the most published Norwegian photographer. In 1916, Wilse toured the U.S. lecturing about Norway and showing his hand-painted lantern slides.

The end of the 19th century saw the rise of a movement of amateur photographers based on affiliations of gentlemen and women of means. Camera clubs were organized all over Scandinavia and were part of an international community of photographers with artistic pretensions. Through the activities of these amateur societies, the idea of photography as fine art got a foothold in the Nordic countries. Pictorialism attracted a substantial following and some important professional photographers, among them Henry B. Goodwin, had lasting influence. In Sweden, this movement was reported and published in the magazine “Fotografisk Tidsskrift,” and in Denmark in “Amatørfotografen.” From about 1900, amateur photographers from the Nordic countries attended international exhibitions in Germany, Italy, and England, where photography was heralded as a new medium of high art.

Before the Second World War, the cultural links between Germany and the Nordic countries were very strong and some of the most well-known photographers, such as the Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm (b. 1928) and the Norwegian Kjell Sten Tollefsen (b.1913), studied in Germany in the 1930s. The expressive style of the Norwegian documentary and press-photographer Kåre Kivijärvi (1939-1991), based on studies with the German Otto Steinert in the late 1950s, is outstanding. The focus of most Nordic photographers, however, shifted to France and the United States. Several Swedish photographers studied in the US from the 1950s onward, and some of them worked as assistants to well- known photographers.

The famous exhibition “The Family of Man”, created by Edward Steichen for The Museum of Modern Art in 1955, toured Europe in the late 1950s, and was also shown in Sweden. The humanistic idea at the base of Steichen’s selection of works, that all men are one family, made many photographers turn to portraying people in surroundings stripped of local identity, underlining what is common to all men. The “Family of Man” included several Swedish photographers: Hans Hammarskiöld, Lennart Nilsson, Hans Malmberg, Karl W. Gullers, Pål Nils Nilsson, Karl Sandels, but only one from Denmark, Wermund Bendtsen, and none from the other Nordic countries. Caroline Hammarskiöld made the portrait of Steichen that follows his introductory essay. The photographs of Christer Strømholm, Sune Jonsson (b.1930), Kåre Kivijärvi, and all the others included in the exhibition at The American–Scandinavian Foundation, can be interpreted as a reaction to this search for a dominating idea of mankind as one big family. These photographers looked for local qualities and the relationship between people and their immediate environment. This has created a tradition that is still vital, and some of the most interesting contemporary photography in the Nordic countries gain distinction from this tradition.

As part of the 1982 program “Scandinavia Today,” organized by The American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Walker Art Center organized a presentation of Scandinavian photography titled “The Frozen Image.” Although this exhibition emphasized iconography and typology, some individual photographers were given prominence: Knut Knudsen as a photographer of landscape, the pictorialist Henry B. Goodwin as a photographer of women, Edvard Munch and John Riise as painter-photographers, Wladimir Schohin as an early master of color, Hans Malmberg as a photojournalist, and Christer Strömholm as a photographer of the dispossessed. The exhibition included relatively few works by younger photographers and the selection seemed casual. The catalogue of the exhibition is still the most comprehensive study in English language on the subject. Since the late 1980s, New York has become a thriving center of activity in all fields of photography, even among Nordic photographers. During the last couple of years, several young aspiring artists from the Nordic countries, working with photography as their preferred medium, have figured in gallery exhibitions or have been favorably mentioned and published in magazines.

Photography in the Nordic countries--as everywhere else--has been marked by the controversies between different camps that see photography as a branch of science or an art. Only a fraction of the most interesting pictures have been produced with the explicit intention of being integrated into the field of art. Whether an image was made as a scientific specimen, a document of cultural history, or a work of art has little or no effect on its aesthetic value. Some of the most interesting images from an aesthetic or formal point of view have often been produced for commercial or other non-art purposes.

The use of photography as a fine art medium has increased dramatically during the 1990s. This has forced art museums to start collecting photography on a scale never before thought possible, and is gradually changing the character of art museums and their exhibition programs and practices. Exhibitions in which material from different departments, juxtapositions of paintings, photographs, drawings, and graphics, are now becoming common in Nordic museums, just as they are in major U.S. and European museums. Several Nordic museums have recently started collecting contemporary photographers in the field of art, which is not without typological complications.

All the Nordic countries, with the exception of Sweden, have recently built new premises for the national museums of photography. In Helsinki, the Finnish Museum of Photography at the Cable Factory opened in February 2000; in Copenhagen, the National Museum of Photography opened in May 2000 as part of the Royal Library; and in Norway, Norsk museum for fotogafi-Preus fotomuseum (the National Museum of Photography), is to be opened in May 2001. These three museums all serve as the national museum specializing in photography. In Reykjavik, the city’s Museum of Photography has recently moved into new quarters, and in Denmark, the Museet for Fotokunst, which collects contemporary photography, has been situated in Brandts Klædefabrik in Odense since 1987. In Sweden, the former Fotografiska Museet has been integrated into the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, but has its own library and exhibition space. In addition to these museums, the national libraries and museums of cultural history have huge holdings of photographic material. In those institutions, photographs are treated mainly as documents of cultural history, with a focus on the subject and not on the aesthetic value of the picture.

The Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation was set up in 1979 in Gothenburg, Sweden. In 1984, the foundation donated money to the Hasselblad Photographic Study Center at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Foundation set up the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg in 1989, making a donation to the city of Gothenburg for an annex to the Gothenburg Museum of Art to house the Foundation, an exhibition hall, and library. The Center, which opened in 1994, curates exhibitions and maintains its own collection. Since 1980, the Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation has awarded an annual grant--a kind of Nobel Prize in the field of photography. Among the award winners are the Americans Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon, William Klein, Irving Penn, Robert Frank, William Eggelston, Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and the Swedes Lennart Nilsson, Sune Jonsson, and Christer Strömholm.

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