Photographer Sten Didrik Bellander

They formulated, practised and represented an epoch-making visual language that stirred up people’s minds in the small country of Sweden. They made photography into its own domain of technical and artistical creativeness, and also a platform for debate and discussion and for standpoints on issues. The attention reached far outside of the photographic circles of that time and made a substantial impact on artists, authors and of course the paper-reading public.

Sten Didrik Bellander had after the war spent a year in New York where he among other things assisted and was inspired by the then almost completely unknown photographer Richard Avedon. He brought the experiences home to Sweden and to his generation friends. Bellander’s studio in central Stockholm became a centre for young bold photographers during the 50’s. He himself came to function as the solid centre of a network of Swedish colleagues who travelled in all directions across the world.

From Bellander’s studio came a swift stream of photographs, ideas and visions that started wild discussions between a younger and an older generation of photographers. Bellander and his friends also founded the now legendary group Tio Fotografer (Ten Photographers, transl.note) here; the group can take the credit of some of the most important contributions to Swedish photography. During these turbulent years Sten Didrik Bellander was himself rather quiet in large public situations. Instead he enthused his colleagues and that came to bring his line of argument into the light of the public debate. During the row of intense discussions the outlines of issues that would engage photographers far into the 70’s evolved.

In Sten Didrik Bellander’s photographs is a surrealistic as well as a realistic dimension- both something vague and something very palpable. His photographs exhibit a distinctive power of observation of objects and things and also power of insight and a humanistic attitude towards other people. In both cases Bellander’s work is characterised by sensitivity, precision and elegant wit. From an early stage Sten Didrik Bellander showed no interest in the bustling work of the press photographer; the studio became his natural place of work. There he finds concentration and has the time to seek and try different expressions in motifs and pictures. But often Bellander has also captured – somehow incidentally – an everyday motif in the city that he has transformed into an extraordinary photographic composition.

In these slices of every day life nothing external has been added except for Bellander’s pronounced power of observation, his humour and feeling for the visuality of the surroundings. Bellander’s jobs – as his friends’ jobs – were commissions from magazines, advertising agencies and industrial firms. The jobs included everything from fashion and food to industrial products. Bellander devoted the same care of form and style to all sorts of motifs and the distinction between what we today would call “commercial photography” and “artistic photography” just didn’t exist. It was not until the 70’s that photography as a medium fell under the notion of art, where Sten Didrik Bellander’s pictures now perfectly naturally belong.