Written by Rod Bradbury, and published in LOFT The Nordic BOOKAZINE No. 1, 2011.
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Stockholm - Europe's New Centre for Contemporary Photography

It is called simply Fotografiska – i.e. ‘Photographic’ but they always use their Swedish name – and has placed Stockholm firmly on the map for anybody interested in contemporary photography. Situated on the city-centre waterfront, in the old south-side harbour area, this museum-cumgallery is housed in a former customs building dating back to 1906 and designed by Ferdinand Boberg, a leading Swedish architect of the period. The Art Nouveau industrial building has been completely renovated thanks to the generosity of the city of Stockholm and is now the home of an independent centre for photography showing 4 major exhibitions a year and as many as 20 smaller exhibitions. The brick façade is intact, but the inside now has a large café and restaurant area with a view across the bay to the city’s north-side waterfront giving a glimpse of several major museums and historical buildings.

Fotografiska only opened in 2010 but has already become very popular. The intention is to exhibit the best photographers from all over the world, many of whom have never been shown in Sweden.

The current exhibitions bear witness to their ambitions. Lady Warhol comprises a unique series of portraits by Christopher Makos of Andy Warhol taken in 1981. At the time, the photographer was inspired by Dadaism and Man Ray’s photographs of Marcel Duchamp wearing a dress under the name Rrose Sélavy. Here it is Warhol who transforms himself into his alter ego Lady Warhol.

Warhol called his good friend Makos ‘the most modern photographer in America’ and their close relationship allowed Makos to portray Warhol in all his grace and awkwardness. Another side of Andy Warhol can be seen in Roland Nemeth’s documentary installation Exploding Plastic Inevitable which refers to media projections created by Warhol in 1966 with music by Velvet Underground.

A third concurrent exhibition, Sarah Moon, features the works of a living legend and one of France’s most renowned contemporary photographers, filmmakers, and artists. Moon was born in England in 1941. After concluding a successful modelling career, she made a name for herself as one of the first female photographers of haute couture. Her imaginative imagery transcends the boundaries between her personal and commercial work, the resulting pictures often reflecting her search for an elusive, unexpected moment, at times melancholy and macabre, but always dynamic. She first plans and stages her photographs with meticulous care, but then waits for the unexpected to happen.

Sitting in the café upstairs in the Fotografiska building you look out across the water to the tiny island of Skeppsholmen where Sweden’s famous Moderna Museet is situated. Moderna has one of the best collections of contemporary art in the world including works by Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Henri Matisse and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as new acquisitions by contemporary artists. This year, the new directors, Daniel Birnbaum and Ann-Sofi Noring, are launching a radical innovative hanging of the collection focusing on photography, Another Story: 1,000 Photographs from the Moderna Museet Collection.

Moderna Museet actually has one of Europe’s finest collections of photography, comprising more than 100,000 works. The re-hanging of the permanent-collection exhibition – at present consisting mainly of paintings – will be done in three stages, the first being Another Story: Possessed by the Camera, which presents contemporary photography-based art. Then, working backwards in time, they will open Another Story: See the World! presenting the period 1920-1980 – this exhibition is scheduled for the summer. And, finally, in the autumn they will look at the early days of photography. Another Story: Written in Light presents the pioneers of photography from 1840 to the first three decades of the 20th century. During the whole of autumn 2011, the entire permanent-collection exhibition at Moderna Museet will consist of photography and photo-based art.

Museum director Daniel Birnbaum describes this ambitious programme: ‘We want to show the museum collection from a new perspective, but also to present an alternative art history, not one that is more true, but simply another perspective. We have noted a strong demand to see more of Moderna Museet’s large collection of photography among our visitors. With this venture, we hope to contribute in a way that only we can, and to give the public what they have a right to expect from us, namely the historic dimension. We are also intensifying our research into photographic images.’

Ann-Sofi Noring, co-director, adds: ‘We are planning to publish four new books about our photography collection together with the German publishing company Steidl. The first book, Reality Revisited, was published in autumn 2010. This will be a ground-breaking project, both for the wider public and for experts on photography. Ours is the largest curated photo presentation ever to be undertaken by a Swedish museum.’

Perhaps Moderna’s new interest in its collection of photographs has been inspired by the success of Fotografiska across the water. Whatever the reason, anybody interested in photography should do their best to visit Stockholm this autumn. Or even earlier, because Moderna has just opened the first Nordic solo exhibition of Jeanloup Sieff (1933-2000) who began photographing in the early 1950s, as a contemporary of Helmut Newton and David Bailey.

Sieff’s images are often sensual and elegant, and in the 1960s he was much in demand as a fashion photographer, especially in the USA. Exhibition curator Anna Tellgren expands on this: ‘In his fashion and advertising photographs the models are characteristically close to the pictorial surface, an effect achieved by using a wide-angle lens. His working method was based on physical and emotional closeness. This lack of distance makes his images exciting and visually interesting.’

The exhibition at Moderna Museet presents a selection of 53 pictures from Sieff’s photographic oeuvre, with an emphasis on his dance photography. Anna Tellgren again: ‘He was interested in the dancers as artists, and the actual struggle during rehearsal to get their bodies to perform more or less impossible movements. His dance photographs are fascinating because they really convey the smell of sweat and the shuffling sound of dance shoes, which is exactly what he was after’.

This article was published in LOFT The Nordic BOOKAZINE No. 1, 2011. It was written by Rod Bradbury.