Photographers

Monica Englund-Johansson (born in 1935)
Monica Englund-Johansson has insightfully portrayed women’s specific situations. Everything from births to the seemingly simple everyday life. In her photographs is a saturated symbolism. An intimacy and a constant seeking to understand and convey. From having documented dramatic situations her work moved over large areas. There are descriptions focusing on form in a matter-of-fact manner with plants as motifs. There is also the insight into the imaginative world of children.

 

Jan Fridlund (born in 1932)
Jan Fridlund is a vigorous photographer who seems to be in constant motion. His photographs of the city of Paris, taken early in his career, are characterised precisely by his own motion. But in the photographs is also the frenzy of the urban, constantly changing city environment with its different citizens. Fridlund’s photographs of Paris attracted a lot of attention because he so often focused on the course of events taking place in the background while the foreground formed an blurred but thought-provoking and flickering surface as a contrast. Fridlund has studied with and assisted photographers like Bert Stern, Irving Penn, and William Klein. He himself has taught at Konstfack in Stockholm [the College of Arts, Crafts and Design, transl. note] and has also held a professorship in photography there.

 

Walter Hirsch (born in 1935)
Walter Hirsch is one of Sweden’s most noted “Street-Photographers”. During the 1960’s and 1970’s he photographed in different large cities like London, Amsterdam and New York. He went to the anonymous, swarming crowds in the streets of the cities and captured skilfully the drama of the anonymous encounters in the “stage design” of the street. Despite a limited physical ability to move he has an unusually quick and intuitive ability to perceive incidents and quick encounters, occurrences which otherwise would pass most people by. Walter Hirsch is also known for inimitably catching human situations, from celebrating Midsummer to the stay in a hospital bed. During a period he worked with a kind of small camera with pictures half the size of those of a minicamera. Even if he wasn’t the first one in Sweden to use such a camera his style of photography lead to an enormous amount of young photographers getting themselves the same kind of camera to read the surrounding world with.

 

Sune Jonsson (born in 1930)
In 1959, Sune Jonsson; field ethnologist, film maker, author and photographer, published the book The village with the blue house. With its unique collection of photographs he showed the way to a new view of photographs. By going to old agrarian environments in Västerbotten he devotedly illustrated the sense of community and the complex life conditions which through the entry of modern times were forced to change or disintegrate. Sune Jonsson was inspired by, among other things, the American Farm Security Administration’s large project of documentation which was carried out in the 1930’s. A number of talented photographers, like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, and text authors worked in the project, depicting people’s situation in the south-west states. Even if Sune Jonsson did not slavishly apply the American’s approach, the knowledge and awareness of this approach was included in the composition of The village with the blue house. The photographs vary from the personally and emotionally experienced to the more concisely depicted.

 

Stig T. Karlsson (born in 1930)
In 1963, Stig T. Karlsson published a collection of photographs about Sicily in book form. That was then one of the most powerful and insightful descriptions that a Swedish photographer had ever produced. The colourful Danilo Dolci had served as guidance for Stig T. Karlsson and his preface also introduces the book. Together with the text author Franco Alasia, Stig T. Karlsson criticised the miserable conditions of the farm workers on the Italian island. They directed furious criticism at the lenience of the Church and its collaboration with the Mafia. Under difficult circumstances Stig T. Karlsson photographed families living like in the Middle Ages, children herding flocks of sheep and being brutally punished if any of the sheep disappeared. The photographs are naked, smelling and have strangely enough an almost “rembrantian” lighting. The photographs are unique because of the purpose, the devotion, the method, and the technique.

 

Anders Petersen (born in 1944)
Anders Petersen’s photographs from Hamburg attracted a lot of attention when they were shown at the Gallery Karlsson in central Stockholm during the 1960’s. The photographs were published a number of times before they finally came in book form under the name Café Lehmitz. Petersen who like Smoliansky and Hirsch belonged to the circles around Christer Strömholm has a special devotion to the unusual, and for example being an outsider. He often took a stand for people who have landed up on the outside of the established society. There is a special tension in Petersen’s photographs which changes between the technically skilful and the compositional. His photographs of the world of shadows has been recognised world wide.

 

Gunnar Smoliansky (born in 1933)
Gunnar Smoliansky began his career as an industrial photographer. Committed to social issues he often participated with photographs in different kinds of debate books. His interest such issues lead to his enrolment in Bildaktivisterna [the Picture Activists, transl. note], a loosely organised, but politically aware group of photographers. Brought up in a musical home it also came natural to him to associate himself with musicians from his own generation. In this connection he took photographs portraying the study groups of Swedish musicians who flocked around the multi-kulti-musician Don Cherry during his time in Stockholm. Cherry, who can be seen with his lately so esteemed son Eagle-Eye in the photographs, had a powerful influence on Swedish musicians. Smoliansky’s photographs are creations reminiscent of a dynamic period and the interesting thing is that he participated in the course of events with the camera as if it was a musical instrument.

 

Christer Strömholm (born in 1918)
Christer Strömholm is a compassionate photographer, a man who has had a great influence on the development of subjective photography in Sweden. A man who feels at home in strange continental places and paradoxically feels totally strange in familiar places at home. Strömholm has said that a photographer can only produce a certain, very limited quantity of photographs of value during her/his lifetime. This he has later himself constantly questioned by producing one collection of photographs of high quality after another. He has himself appeared both as leading actor in the film Myglaren [The Wangler, transl. note] and as a principal for Kursverksamhetens Fotoskola [an educational association’s school of photography, transl. note]. As a teacher he has inspired a great number of young people to photograph with a minicamera.