The photographer’s living space

In 1903 the market shops on the western side of the Stockholm bridge known as Norrbro were pulled down. Alongside their site, on the island of Helgeandsholmen, the parliament building was erected and was completed only two years later. In this bazaar on Norrbro, in the shadow of the royal palace, Albert Bonnier, later to become Sweden’s most influential publisher, had a bookstall. Louis Daguerre’s photographic invention was presented in France in 1839 and a pamphlet describing it was published. In that same year Bonnier had the pamphlet translated and published it in Swedish under the title Daguerrotypen, theoretiskt och praktiskt beskrifven (Theoretical and practical description of the Daguerreotype). The Daguerreotype was the first photographic method to be used in Sweden.

Text: Leif Wigh (From the exhibition catalog)

Only a few years later the first photographic exhibition to be held in Stockholm took place at the palace in the room which is now the Bernadotte library. This exhibition consisted exclusively of Daguerreotypes. There was direct access to the exhibition from Norrbro which had been built in 1806 to link the Old Town with Norrmalm and which was a fashionable promenade. It was there that people who wanted to be seen would walk back and forth. Not far from the bridge, and from the square now known as Gustav Adolfs torg, one of Stockholm’s first photographic studios was established. During the 1840s people producing Daguerreotypes made use of various glass-fronted buildings but only in the Summer. It was in the Summer that there was sufficient light to make photographic exposures. In Winter there was not enough light. The Daguerreotype by Johan Wilhelm Bergström shown in this exhibition is, thus, unique in several senses in that it was taken out of doors in a snow-covered garden in Stockholm during the 1840s.

Pictures from the early years consisted principally of full and half-figure portraits. A small number of photographers made use of the Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot’s method of producing negatives and positives on paper (using salts). But most photographers made use of Daguerreotypes. More important in the development was when photographers began to use glass negatives (wet colloid negatives) combined with albumen silver paper that could be developed using daylight and without chemicals. At the same time photographers began to look for motifs outdoors to give their picture of the city as a living space. The palace, Norrbro and the immediate neighbourhood were among the earliest motifs. Initially motifs consisted of buildings and static details. The people, constantly on the move, constituted a motif that it was not yet possible for the camera and the available chemicals to depict. But new photographic chemicals and various innovations in due course allowed photographers to portray well-organized groups in motion; for example the soldiers crossing Norrbro in order to take part in the changing of the guards at the palace.

The heights of the island of Södermalm provided the viewpoint for numerous photographs of the city. In his novel Röda Rummet (The Red Room) Strindberg let his hero, Arvid Falk, reflect on the position of the city and its mood seen from Mosebacke. And Mosebacke was a popular vantage point for taking photographs of the city. But even the tower of the Katarina Church was used for taking pictures of a living Stockholm.

With the extension of the railway and the final link that was completed in 1871 tourism increased. Business-like photographers saw in tourism a new opportunity as the number of portrait photographers grew in the 1860s. Really business-like photographers, like German-born Johannes Jaeger, started methodically to document Stockholm. The nation, the native land, the capital and the Swedish flag were all concepts that entered into the photographer’s world. Jaeger produced numbered sequences of pictures of various places and buildings. He principally included buildings that had to do with the new ideas. His motifs consisted mainly of the palace but also of the Nationalmuseum, the old Opera, the House of the Nobility, the central station, the Grand Hôtel, the Rydberg Hotel, Bern’s restaurant and various royal statues. This was, indeed, a strange mixture of the past and of modernity in the rapidly growing capital. The beautiful, brown, albumen-silver photographs were sold to tourists who visited Stockholm – the city on the water.

The long exposures meant that people, animals and wagons in motion were not distinct in the photographs. Street-life and people’s meetings were not yet important. This was to come later. Rather, it was the place where the people met that was important. Even if photographers did not celebrate Stockholm with quite the same passion as the poets, they made serious efforts at portraying city life. Karl Edward Stenqvist, a customs officer who lived on Södermalm, tried to depict the mood of the city in the late 1800s as did his near neighbour the painter Eugene Jansson. With his silver bromide gelatine negative Stenqvist photographed the view from Mariaberget across Riddarfjärden and in towards the centre of the city. The new photographic materials made shorter exposures possible so that Stenqvist could make use of the morning light that created reliefs in the spaces between the buildings on Södermalm and the structure of the rocky inclines of Mariaberget when he photgraphed his own neighbourhood from Riddarholmen.

During the first decades of the 1900s Henry B. Goodwin and Ferdinand Flodin regularly chose the city as a motif. In their sketch-like and diffuse portraits they used smoke from the factories, from steam locomotives and from vessels in the harbour to create a particular mood for a romanticized picture, an impression of the city. A younger generation, headed by Karl Sandels, disliked the romanticising notions and instead presented the city and its inhabitants with an unvarnished image. Sandel’s generation of photographers discovered the forms and the patterns, the architecture and the facades and they gave the burgeoning 1930s a pictorial realism that gave nothing away to the literary artists.

From the 1890s onwards professional and amateur photographers joined forces in carefully portraying the city. But at the outbreak of the Second World War, with new and simplified cameras and with new photographic materials, this sense of community largely ceased. Professional photographers started to collaborate with architects, with the press, with advertising agencies and other companies needing pictures. Amateur photographers returned to the bosom of the family and restricted themselves to Sunday afternoon walks.

For professional photographers, the founding of the Association of Swedish Photographers in 1895 was decisive in terms of competition and prices. But the foundation in 1888 of the Photographic Association in Stockholm, in which amateurs and professionals met together created a forum for pictorial quality. It was within this association with its numerous competitions that pictorial styles, ideals, techniques and understanding of materials developed. Initially, professional photographers were not eligible for membership of the Photographic Society but an alteration to the rules of association made them welcome. It was within the Photographic Society that the photographers of the day were active. It was at the society’s meetings that new photographs were shown. The association also organized exhibitions where images of the city as well as portraits and still-life photos were shown.

Even if the activities continued, the quality of pictures in the late 1930s and interest in them declined. The association increasingly developed into an amateur society, for better or worse. During the 1940s it was re-formed and became part of the umbrella organization known as the National Association of Swedish Photographers. At times attempts were made to stimulate the creative spirit. People like Helmer Bäckström and Ture Sellman, who were seriously interested in photography, struggled to raise standards but the serious photographers sought other meeting places. Some of these were in smaller societies that developed from time to time but that disappeared just as rapidly.

One person who was active both in the professional and the amateur organizations was K. W. Gullers who portrayed the modern Stockholm that had developed during the 1930s. Gullers became a successful photographer. In due course he abandoned his sensitive portraits of everyday life in favour of sentimental and idealizing portrayals of Stockholm life that only existed in books.

When Stockholm was assaulted by a wave of demolition of buildings that can only be described as planned devastation, photographer Lennart af Petersens made his appearance. He took numerous photographs showing how Stockholm was disappearing into the mouth of the excavators and was being turned into vast heaps of rubble on the outskirts of the city. Regardless of whether Lennart af Petersens was portraying demolition on Norrmalm or the preservation of Östermalm he and his photographs were diametrically opposite to those of Gullers. Lennart af Peteresens worked as a photographer for the Stockholm City Museum. Despite his position he was obliged to finance his photographs and his book on the Klara neighbourhood of Stockholm himself. The neighbourhood was destroyed but it lives on in his photographs. With his pictures Lennart af Petersens wanted to show that the authorities should have preserved the old city blocks which were an invaluable heritage, and should have refurbished them.

After the end of the Second World War the photographic industry expanded rapidly both in Europe and the USA. New cameras were developed and new photographic materials produced. Both Gullers and af Petersens made use of these in their work. The new Hasselblad cameras, together with Rolleiflex and Leicas were the instruments of the new generation of urban photographers. Rolf Winquist, Sten Didrik Bellander, Hans Hammarskiöld and, later, Gunnar Smoliansky used these instruments to capture rapid impressions of the life of the city as well as architectural and structural images.

The life of the city, by day and by night, is recorded in the work of the city’s photographers; messenger boys with their city jargon as well as those ever-young girls. Life in the city and the city as living space have been defined thanks to all those wise photographers who chose to use their artistry to portray this particular motif; a motif that is constantly changing.