In his earlier works, he frequently depicted movement against counter-movement. He described the concentrated moment of a chance encounter with the background characters in many of his street scenarios. Events that were unplanned and had no history were made into pictures. This is how the people appear, for instance, in his diary-like pictures from London in 1968, in which he demonstrates a personal style of street photography. Albeit with a much gentler tone than in similar images by American photographers. The London narrative grew into an exhibition – the first solo exhibition of a Swedish photographer at Moderna Museet.
In 1969, he conquered Rome on the pillion of a scooter. The scenes he encountered could have been taken from one of the neo-realist films he loved in his teenage years. The photographs were a further development of his street photography that was shown the same year at the legendary Galleri Karlsson on Vidargatan in Stockholm. Rarely have the inhabitants and city of Rome been so intimately, and yet so personally, exposed.
But body language played an essential part in Walter’s photographs even before this. His portrayal of the Midsummer celebrations of a group of young artists is certainly innovative. This series of pictures in the classical reportage style also reveals that Walter Hirsch belongs to the so-called Life Generation – the informal international group of photographers who grew up with LIFE Magazine as their ideal. The Midsummer reportage demonstrates his light tone, and his intuitive grasp of the pattern of the movements of the participants. Walter Hirsch’s unique approach is characterised by a curiosity about man which runs alongside his curiosity about the machine, the camera.
Over the years, he has been highly instrumental in promoting the cameras used by hobby photographers, as well as the panoramic cameras that few had heard of. With the latter type of camera he did an inventory of salt-splashed Dutch beaches in spring, motifs of desolate meetings between sea and sand. He also used the panoramic camera in the streets of New York – in the twilight of the tall buildings, where people walked by without noticing one another. The technique is clearly reflected in the images. With a smaller camera he created a contrast to the panoramas by telling about pleasant, glimmering bike trips in Central Park. Yet again, his imagery was novel and disarming.
He also produced numerous photos during a trip to Thailand, more stationary images than in his other series. Here, his empathy, his feeling for the Thais, is in strong evidence. His large series “Hjärtats Journal” (Case-Book of the Heart) – taken horizontally from his sickbed after a heart-attack – portrays his fellow patients and the stream of visitors in short, choppily rapid sequences. On looking at Walter Hirsch’s production of photography as a whole, his fascination for moving images, cinema and its drama, is apparent. He has also worked closely with several cinematographers and contributed with his flow of ideas to the creation of many Swedish films.
Black-and-white pictures of nude men and women is his most recent independent narrative. The men and women move – sometimes violently – around the studio in front of his camera. He has used a modified circular flash to achieve the beautiful spread of light across the bodies in the motifs. Today, Walter Hirsch examines the movements of human bodies from a wheelchair. His own counter-movement is not as obvious nowadays, but the sensual depth is just as apparent.
Leif Wigh
