INTO SOMETHING RICH AND STRANGE

 Anche le nuvole in Italia sono belle.

CONFER WITH THE SPRUCES, REVEL IN THE MUDDLE: FANNY CHURBERG AND CARL FREDRIK HILL ABREAST

Carl Fredrik Hill, The Tree and the River Bend, 1877. Photo: Åmells Konsthandel, Stockholm.

Carl Fredrik Hill, The Lime Quarry, 1876. Photo: Bukowskis, Stockholm.

It wasn’t over till the fat lady DJed and the two performers on the blazing raft on the Seine churned out the wicked kitsch that is “Imagine”, Lennon’s ode to world Communism. The vomitory inauguration of the Paris Olympics (with the insignificant athletes tucked away on dinky boats) was a baleful flaunt under the care of our new totalitarians and their little foot soldiers, the witless wokies. A certain novel from 1948 warned us about a time when ignorance would be cherished as strength – but carry on you fools.

 

When Sony ditched Lasse Hallström on the grounds that he couldn’t keep up with the lousy standards of today’s Hollywood, the Swedish director spawned a new project at home, involving his daughter and his wife as the transcendental painter Hilma af Klint (1862–1944). Hilma (2022) has the looks of the artist’s day and age, but the film’s dishonest, dumb and lifeless sentiments are all cooked up in the usual woke pan of contemporary Feminism. Anyone who has encountered af Klint’s strange and vast paintings (and who has the capacity to think for a few seconds) knows that a cornerstone in her art is the beautiful erotic dualism between the male and the female. Consequently, you have to be an imbecile to put these words in her mouth, but these filmmakers do: “There is only one sex.”

 

Although the catalogue has its mandatory share of woke pan nonsense (this is Sweden after all), the marvellous yin-and-yang of XX and XY chromosomes rules at Sven-Harry’s Art Museum in Stockholm, where the reflective yet emotionally intense landscape painting of Fanny Churberg (1845–1892) and Carl Fredrik Hill (1849–1911) is on show – a face-to-face/head-on exercise that confers with the forests and spruces of Churberg’s Finland (a host of them are curiously painted in Düsseldorf) and the precious vision-lustred vistas of Hill, the Swedish giant with the lunatic in his head.

 

“I have wanted to do an exhibition with Carl Fredrik Hill for a long time, and one of the biggest reasons is that the founder of the museum, Sven-Harry Karlsson, had one of the largest private collections of Hill before he donated it. Carl Fredrik Hill is not only Sven-Harry’s favourite artist, but also that of many artists in the present day. Many people know about Hill’s period of illness, and there are many exhibitions around it. I myself was very curious to explore a little more about the ten years before he was sadly struck by schizophrenia. To help me out, I invited Pedro Westerdahl as a guest curator. At the same time, I felt that I wanted to highlight not only Hill but also a coeval female artist who was just as skilled,” explains Museum Director Dragana Kussoffsky Maksimović.

 

Though she had been on a museum tour around Finland together with Sven-Harry Karlsson a few years earlier, the XX share of the exhibition was an elated discovery for Kussoffsky Maksimović, as for most Swedes. “I couldn’t find a name here in Sweden, so I called Finland. Barbro Schauman [the other guest curator] replied in a flash: ‘It is Fanny Churberg.’ I didn’t know about her but started to google and saw this fantastic landscape painting, and I was completely taken by it. It was amazing that it held such power, even as online images.”

 

“And here they are, a year and a half later, side by side – Fanny Churberg and Carl Fredrik Hill – who also, as it turned out, were in Paris at the same time. There is no documentation that their paths were crossed. But Churberg had [the Swedish painter] Wilhelm von Gegerfelt as a teacher, who was Carl Fredrik Hill’s close friend and patron, so it is highly likely that they met. And now they are facing each other, more or less one hundred and fifty years later, here at Sven-Harry’s Art Museum.”

 

Towards a New Landscape is indeed a relevant exhibition in this vexingly layouted art museum – this time with the room at the top as the best option, where the two artists’ influences are made known (including a painting by Corot) and where Hill’s and Churberg’s pieces work quite well together unlike the combos in the less tiny galleries.

 

Fanny Churberg’s adventure began on a steamboat to the country’s new white capital Helsinki in the early autumn of 1865. She was only twelve when her mother died, and for this reason she had to grow up all too fast since there were six younger siblings who needed her parenting and her services at home in Vaasa. Now she was nineteen years old and free for the first time, her beloved father had recently passed away after a long period of failing health. The young woman couldn’t sleep that final night on the steamboat, life was just too beautiful and full of hope – the sea was smooth, the stars waltzed for her in the dark and she was wealthy enough to do whatever she desired with her future.

 

In her first letter from Helsinki (dated September 29) Churberg wrote, “Perhaps too bold to think of the spruce tree – the image of fidelity – but the spruce is a Finn and so am I.” A few weeks later she described a walk in a park with some friends: “I enjoyed the fresh breeze and the wild nature indescribably – an autumn landscape lit by the October sun is very lovely – everything looks fresh and mighty bold, the air is so clean and invigorating, and the bare trees bear witness to struggle and battle. Here it was mostly conifers, hills and valleys, lake and rock walls. My company thought it was not enough of order, I enjoyed the disorder – had longed to get out into God’s free nature.” This was how Churberg looked at things and experienced them, and these were the particulars that she would mirror in her landscape painting.

 

Her younger colleague Helene Schjerfbeck wrote many years later in her diary: “That which lies innermost – passion – that I would like to reveal, but then one is ashamed of oneself and cannot conjure it up – because one is a woman. Women have seldom become such conjurers. Fanny Churberg did.”

 

Once Churberg had come to the conclusion that it was an artist that she wanted to be, she confided to a friend that “now I have decided to paint like a woman never has”. She spent the happiest years of her life in Düsseldorf in the winters – in the late 1860s, with a long break during the Franco–Prussian War (more of the forced old dread and sacrifice for the “privileged” sex), and then throughout the first part of the 1870s – where she was privately tutored by male painters who supported her in every way possible (yet the catalogue runs its dull male-oppression narrative about how the “limitations and obligations being a female artist entailed”).

 

“The Düsseldorf School” was a mixed bag of showy, jocular genre painting, while imaginative assessments were kept in low regard, with the flipside that it made the general public discover art in a different way. Though there are elements of the picturesque and the decorative in her less interesting works, Churberg was for the most part herself and painted in raw opposition to the run-of-the-mill idealism of the day, using (comparatively) brave colours and brushstrokes which render her paintings a kind of artificiality that is felt but also wordless. Guest curator Barbro Schauman points out that Churberg “never sought the beautiful and arranged, it is a slash-and-burn that has come to the fore in these paintings”.

 

“For Fanny Churberg nature was a battlefield for the never-ending struggle of powerful emotions and atmospheres. Nature was something altogether too great for man to have any part in it,” tells the guidebook to Finland’s National Gallery, Ateneum. “Churberg’s contemporaries found it difficult to embrace the fervour of her art. Her paintings seemed too strange, the colours loud and garish, the harshness of the landscapes frightening to idealistic tastes natured by [Finnish writer Zacharias] Topelius’s spirit of idyllic nature worship. Churberg’s trees spoke of struggle against the wind and storm, the solidity of her stones seemed crushing and hostile. Churberg’s season was dark late autumn rather than bright snowy winter. Her favourite time of day was sunset, dusk, moonlit night rather than the light of days.”

 

The piece of land that is Finland had been part of the kingdom of Sweden for some four hundred and fifty years when it became a grand duchy under Tsar Alexander I in 1809. The 1800s were a time with a new sense of nationhood, not just in Finland but in many countries. The greatest emblem of Fennomania was a work of poetic folklore that had been compiled for decades by Elias Lönnrot into the national epic the Kalevala (a definite version came out in 1849), published in Finnish and not Swedish that was the official language and the language spoken by the educated classes in Finland.

 

“Romantic nationalism began to affect the visual arts at about the same time as it has literature. But the particular problem, as far as painting and sculpture were concerned, was to establish a fine art tradition of technical proficiency with which to express it. Peasant handicrafts might continue to flourish, but fine art had only existed at a modestly provincial level,” writes John Boulton Smith in The Golden Age of Finnish Art: Art Nouveau and the National Spirit. “Up to the 1880s the subjects chosen were often empathically Finnish, but the pictures look merely typically 19^th century as the artists struggled, with increasing success, to master the various degrees of international romanticised Realism.”

 

The highly religious Churberg was a passionate spokeswoman for Finnishness. One hundred years before Kraftwerk made Düsseldorf great again, the city and its distantness from the land of the 168,000 lakes and the deep spruce forests only emphasised Fanny Churberg’s national attachment, which is more than evident in her Düsseldorf paintings. In a letter she tells a friend that she is working on a picture of an imminent thunderstorm, “and as I paint it, I have such a warm summer feeling, as if I were sitting there and could hear the whispering of the birches, smell the flowering fragrance of the rye, and the air would be so very, very light – and my heart too”. In her mind and in her art, she was always back in Finland.

 

Barbro Schauman says that Churberg’s time in Paris – October 1875 to April 1876 – was decisive for the remaining years that she dedicated to painting. “She visited museums, galleries, she painted for von Gegerfelt and she sent her paintings home for exhibitions. And above all, she was inspired by [the great name of the time, Charles-Françios] Daubigny and Corot. She was very much influenced by these two, and after Paris came her moonlit landscapes, atmospheric landscapes, evening blushes and nature scenes that cannot be imagined without this time in Paris. Düsseldorf was her schooling, where she learnt to paint technically, but the soul of her landscapes came after Paris, in 1876, for barely four years. Her production was also very small: about two hundred and fifty oil paintings, which is not much for an artist.”

 

Churberg painted seven still lifes in Paris. Three of these are displayed at Sven-Harry’s but the impression they leave is baroque and backwards. The parks in Paris could not possibly reflect the wild nature of her temper – three landscape paintings were however made during a fortnight in the Forêt Dominale de Meudon before she left France, only to return to Paris one last time for the Exposition Universelle in 1879.

 

Two things piqued Churberg’s curiosity in the mid-1870s during her six-month stay in Paris. The first one was the Barbizon School of artists who suffused their paintings with an atmospheric glean that really never grows old. Churberg brought this approach back to Finland and originated the finest paintings of her life – as Markku Valkonen puts it in Finnish Art Over the Centuries, “Her work during that brief period was uneven but astounding. Churberg painted boldly simplified pieces that at later age would have been called Expressionist. It seems as if Impressionism liberated Churberg from her Romantic outlook by giving her the right to use independent brushstrokes and colour.”

 

In his book about East European Art 1650–1950, Jeremy Howard discusses how these last astounding years of painting were “marked by a radical departure from convention. In particular she challenged social codes concerning the ‘feminine’. Deeply affected by the pleinairisme she had witnessed in France, Churberg’s landscapes became images of the alien force of nature. Using increasingly free, broad and violent brushstrokes, she expressed the human relationship with this force as a strongly emotional yet ultimately insignificant struggle. Preferring wild and bleak northern scenes, the dark seasons of autumn and winter, the dark forests in summer, and dusk, hers was a nature forbidding to man and yet whose drama touched a chord with her passionate temperament.”

 

During the winter of 1880, Churberg stopped painting altogether, she also destroyed some of her recent works. Receiving the Finnish Art Society’s Ducat Prize the previous year was just way too late for this resolute artist who only gained the smallest acknowledgement in her motherland during her short lifespan, until she was rediscovered in 1919 by the country’s leading art dealer Gösta Stenman. The other thing that Churberg brough with her from Paris was a newfound preference for the decorative arts. In 1879 she and architect Jac Ahrenberg founded the Friends of Finnish Handicrafts with the purpose “to promote handicrafts in Finland and their patriotic and artistic refinement”.

 

“In all fields of culture the voice of international liberalism was at loggerheads with the views of national Fennomania,” argue Merja Manninen and Päivi Setälä in The Lady with the Bow: The Story of Finnish Women. “As a Fennoman, Churberg set as her goal the development of a ‘Finnish style’. The Friends of Finnish Handicrafts circulated new ideas and models for handiwork based on folk art. Fanny Churberg also wrote about these ideas in the press. The society’s greatest achievements were in participation in the Art and Industry Exhibition in Copenhagen in 1888 and the Paris World Exhibition in 1889. The textiles for the Paris exhibition were to be Fanny Churberg’s last major work for the society.”

 

Before the (imaginary) band that Carl Fredrik Hill was in started playing different tunes, he produced two hundred landscape paintings that are as profound, refined, raw, elegiac and stunning as Talk Talk’s last two albums, Spirit of Eden (1988) and Laughing Stock (1991).

 

Guest curator Pedro Westerdahl talks about how Hill “explored the possibilities of painting in a way that is unrivalled in Swedish art history. He went to great lengths to create a style of painting that foreshadowed Symbolism ten years later. He unravelled these artistic knots in a couple of years, which is why we must also highlight his healthy period, it is extremely exciting. In Churberg’s work there are often figures, but not in Hill’s. Hill wanted the viewer to populate his landscapes. Hill’s landscapes are actually camouflaged self-portraits, he expresses his own pain in these paintings. There is a lot of emotional content in his painting during this period and I think it is so incredibly transformative for its time.”

 

Carl Fredrik Hill was in truth two dissimilar artists, with two dissimilar non-careers. During the second term as the homebound madman-genius – when his mother and sister and the housemaid in the family home at Skomakaregatan in Lund (behind the City Art Gallery) in southern Sweden provided him with four sheets of paper each day to draw on – Hill wrote in his scattered 248-page-long manuscript: “I sing how a picture becomes deep and true / Of how vividly it reveals nature / And how a picture in its own greatness burns / And how a picture in its own true feeling smiles.”

 

Hill’s old father was an erratic nutter who set the ground for Carl Fredrik’s ill health and further did what was in his power to put a lid on his son’s artistic dreams. Lars Gårding describes in Mathematics and Mathematicians: Mathematics in Sweden Before 1950 how Hill Sr was “the source of the anecdote about the learned professor who built himself a house without a staircase to the second floor and a fireplace without a flue. But it was the memory of Hill’s curious notations that survived longest in the mythology of Lund professors.” The mathematical father’s eccentricity included ploys such as his suggestion to make the mustard seed a unit of measure and his thesis on “The Average Distance of Fields to the Home”.

 

Carl Fredrik Hill’s way towards a landscape painting that burns and smiles as if the certitude of the universe is speaking to us began at the provincial Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in the fall of 1871, when he was twenty-two years old. Lars Ragnar Forsberg remarks in his book on the country’s famous banker and major art collector, Ernest Thiel, that the Swedish art students’ flight to Paris “almost had the character of exile. The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where many of them had been pupils, was a stuffy and disadvantageous institution. The young painters’ criticism was not gracious. Carl Fredrik Hill felt that none of the teachers could either paint or teach.”

 

Before he abandoned his Stockholm situation, Hill wrote to his parents – who he had to curry favour from to receive the monetary aid that he was completely dependent on – stating that “wait till I get to Paris and learn to paint, and then I shall earn money, and it will be my pleasure to show the old school here how rotten were the idols they have kneeled down for and worshipped”. Hill came to Paris on November 7, 1873 with the objective “to arrive at the true harmony between the inner and outer, between the spiritual and the sensuous, between feeling and understanding”.

 

The great Corot was the artist in France who overwhelmed the young Swede for “Corot has discovered a new world, because he has discovered a new way of seeing the old.” The ethereal quality of the French artist’s works was what especially persevered with Hill. The summer of 1874 was spent in Barbizon (south of Paris) accompanied by the German painter Max Liebermann (and two Hungarian colleagues, László Paál and Mihály Munkácsy). Half a decade later Liebermann told Swedish art historian Adolf Anderberg that “there was something of the visionary about my friend Hill, something which set him in a class by himself”.

 

In 1874, a roof window in Hill’s studio home in Paris fell over his face and scarred him both on the outside and the inside. The artist remarked that “I would rather lose my nose than my genius, because you very often spot beautiful noses but very rarely great geniuses.” It is not sure whether Hill’s call-me-genius disposition stemmed from an actual understanding of his true potency as a God-given artist, or if most of this derived from poor self-esteem – however, these are the kinds of things that he boasted in his letters: “My friends have proclaimed that I am a genius, which I have always been convinced of myself, but I don’t know how it will end if I fail in all the great things that I intend to do. I’ll be the laughingstock of my enviers at home.”

 

Carl Fredrik Hill completed a work in 1875 that he had initiated in Stockholm and that he had erased and repainted fifty times, and it is a moonshine landscape that is in the Sven-Harry’s show. That year was the sole occasion when the Paris Salon accepted a painting from Hill. In 1876 he penned that, “I have now arrived at the conviction that the one thing to seek in art is the true, le vrai. But not the banal naturalistic, but rather the heart of truth.” When he for the last time was rejected in 1877, Hill thundered: “Any old spice dealer can learn to paint a picture that will be accepted; and believe me, having painted as long as I have, it would be the easiest thing in the world to get two works in, if I were to betray my originality and my conscience as an artist.”

 

In the spring and summer of 1877, Hill was chasing after his ends in a roaming mode around the Seine, in the rural areas south of Paris and always with the river close by. His most famous and to the format largest painting, The Tree and the River Bend, has a given place at Sven-Harry’s Art Museum but was bafflingly turned down by the Salon. This is a masterpiece that shines of carefree solitude and a sudden respite from life’s ailments. The cat who walked by himself wrote to his family in Lund: “I feel like a pearl in gold.”

 

The catalogue is edited with a bit of the ordinary inconsistency, and the foreword regurgitates the common inculcated affectations of the climate emergency – “We are in the midst of a critical event in the Earth’s 4.5-billion-year-long history. Climate disasters come one after the other” – while one of the essays informs us about France’s “unusually intense summer heat” of 1877 that made Hill relocate to a seaside town in Normandy for a month, where he painted a new marine every happy day: “There is no more similarity between what I used to do and what I do now than between night and day. As heavy, dark and gloomy as my works were before, they are as light, bright and airy now. The asphalt is totally banned.”

 

The “asphalt” returned all too soon, though. Back in Paris, Hill painted a few masterworks in Parisian blue and cadmium yellow that foreshadowed his fast-approaching schizophrenia. Hill was twenty-eight years old when he completely lost his mind and his screams and frenzies became insufferable for the neighbours. (When some friends visited Hill a few weeks earlier that winter and asked him to close the window to his freezing studio, he told them to shut the hell up, he was already someplace else and he was sweltering.) On January 19, 1878, Wilhelm von Gegerfelt and another Swedish artist arrived by horse and carriage to take Hill, as they asserted, to an art exhibition. The two men jumped out of the carriage just before it passed the gates to Dr Blanche’s Maison de Santé in Paris, with a crying Hill inside.

 

Hill’s famous painting of a hearse with the red glowing dot that is pushing through a despairing landscape is in the Sven-Harry’s exhibition and it was executed at the Passy mental asylum as a remembrance of the kidnapping – an abduction that was absolutely necessary given Hill’s severe schizophrenia and prosecution delusion. (His abductors did something indefensible however when they obliterated all the paintings in his studio that they found too wacky and offensive.) Hill had noted in December 1877 that “One hour’s painting madness is so glorious that one would gladly give up a whole ordinary life for it.” A month later he was insane for life.

 

In June 1880, Hill’s two sisters Hedda and Marie-Louise travelled to Paris to move him back to Sweden. He spent a few years in an asylum in Lund, and the remaining decades of his life in his native home where thousands of drawings were made, depicting the fantastic journeys Hill savoured in his head. The only ones who saw these works other than his family were unknowing people who were just passing by on the street when he used to exhibit his drawings in the garden on Sundays.

 

In Hill’s Lund manuscript is written: “Madness – how sublime when you wholly shut out the world.”

Fanny Churberg, Mountain Landscape, Savolax, 1874. Photo: Erkki Salminen, Ostrobothnian Museum, Vaasa.

 

Fanny Churberg, Moon Rises Over Fog Bank, 1880. Photo: Erkki Salminen, Ostrobothnian Museum, Vaasa.

Carl Fredrik Hill and Fanny Churberg: Towards a New Landscape at Sven-Harry’s Art Museum in Stockholm through September 15, 2024.

NIGHTS ARE WARM AND THE DAYS ARE YOUNG: THE GOLDEN YEARS OF KARY H LASCH

© Kary H Lasch/Bridgeman Images.

Cannes was to blame, he told himself defensively. It was a city made for the indulgence of the senses, all ease and sunshine and provocative flesh.

 

– Irwin Shaw, Evening in Byzantium (1973)

 

It was the best of times, it was the best of times, it was the age of personality, it was the age of proficiency, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of great looks, it was the season of light, it was the season of nourishment, it was the spring of hope, it was the sweet life any time of the year when Jesus came to Rome dangling from a helicopter.

 

The February 1966 issue of Playboy includes an interview with the director of La dolce vita (1960) which starts off like this: “‘You’ve been accused of embroidering the truth outrageously even in recounting the story of your own life. One friend says that you’ve told him four completely different versions of your breakup with your first sweetheart. Why?’ Fellini: ‘Why not? She’s worth even more versions. Che bella ragazza! People are worth much more than truth, even when they don’t look as great as she did. If you want to call me a liar in this sense, then I reply that it’s indispensable to let a storyteller colour a story, expand it, deepen it, depending on the way he feels it has to be told. In my films, I do the same with life.’”

 

The legendary Kary Herman Lasch (1914–1993) from Prague, Bohemia, was a keen character, a teller of tall tales and trumped-up stories. But the marvellous thing about it is that they were all in some way or another based on true events and actual encounters, which hundreds and hundreds of his best pictures give evidence of: the speciality of his intimate portraits of the stars and starlets of the dolce vita era (and later artists and directors), his considerate and beautiful photojournalism that never circumvented the depths of human life, and his early and much delightful girl photography of the world’s loveliest unknowns.

 

“He told a lot stories in different ways,” says Michel Hjorth who with his associate Christer Löfgren administer The Kary H Lasch Archive – comprising over half a million pictures from the man’s roughly fifty years in the service of photography – which has been in their possession since 2019. “Kary had to sell his pictures to make a living. He was making good money, but he wanted to have all his pictures published so he told his different stories to different gangs, and they were in turn distorted in interviews. There was a mystique to the whole thing that was building up. To sell his pictures he had to be really sharp, and he was. He could tell any story he wanted. It was all about arousing interest all the time.”

 

The central piece on the display table at Fotografiska in Stockholm, where the quite sensational Kary H Lasch: The Golden Years is on show (and which later this spring moves to Tallinn for a new arrangement), is a portrait of Lasch taken by Michel Hjorth who was the photographer’s friend and pizza companion (Lasch was a vegetarian so he always had a Margherita) for the last fourteen years of his life. And here’s Lasch, elegant enough for Sweden, in a waistcoat, tie and a light jacket, his legs apart on a sofa, fist clenched, making his best angry face with a pair of mad googly eyes attached behind his thick glasses. “I hate photographers, except for Michel …!!” he has jestingly scrawled on the print with the sort of black marker pen that he always used to border his press photos with. This is the other side of Kary Lasch, the cavorter.

 

“He was a very serious person,” Hjorth assures, “but outwardly he appeared to be a clown and many people couldn’t cope with the fact that he spaced out as hard as he did. He had a basic character and you can see it very early on in his private pictures from home. At the age of five, Kary lured in the neighbour girl and promised her a cucumber if she stripped naked.” The showcase is merely a brush of items representing Lasch’s extraordinary life, such as a copy of Photography magazine of June 1952, his first international cover; Lasch’s spoof on Life with the “Great Photographer” type of person bragging about his camera gear possessions, and a photo of the BBC visiting him in Stockholm for a thirty-minute special about his alignment with the stars.

 

Marvin Heiferman articulates in his book Photography Changes Everything that “Photographs don’t only show us things, they do things. They engage us optically, neurologically, intellectually, emotionally, viscerally, physically.” The Golden Years at Fotografiska, oh the show – it’s pure eye candy. Kary H Lasch: The Golden Years is the kind of thing that animates our heads and our hearts and our loins. It carries the joy, knack and profoundness of this man who was one of the most industrious and dedicated portraitists during the high-life of the 1950s and early 60s, the golden years when the movie legends looked so immaculately dapper, as if beyond reproach, and yet so alive and comfortable in their own skin.

 

“Kary was a wonderful, wonderful friend and I miss him very much. We stayed friends until the end of his life. Now at eighty-four, I still get a lump in my throat remembering that day. Dear Kary, whose talent with the lens was unequalled. And he was admired by great artists like Pablo Picasso,” expresses the lovely France Nuyen via email. Nuyen was not yet fifteen years old when she arrived at the Festival de Cannes in April 1953, riding on a motorcycle with her friends from the École des Beaux-Arts where she was the famed institution’s very own mascotte. She was very shy, strikingly beautiful, and there was not a snapper in Cannes who did not aspire to photograph this remarkable girl.

 

“As soon as we got there, I was faced with having to hide behind my big architect friends to discourage them. The one who would not give up was Kary Lasch. He was stopping the traffic on the Croisette by pretending that his little imaginary dog was having a poo-poo in the middle of the street, making the infuriated drivers honk and scream in anger. But Kary would not move until his invisible dog had finished and Kary would lift the dog’s tail and clean the little behind with his handkerchief. By then there was a huge crowd of people watching and laughing. Then Kary came up to us and said to me, ’Now that I made you laugh, will you let me take your picture?’ All my friends said yes and I ended up being photographed by Kary Lasch and I was on the cover of a lot of international magazines as ’The Girl on the Beach at Cannes’. Kary went on taking pictures of me during my whole career in Hollywood and on Broadway so I owe him everything.”

 

There is a picture on Wikipedia from 1978 of Lasch in his very charming and likewise peculiar two-floor studio at Skeppargatan 4 (within sniffing distance from Sweden’s most expensive street, Strandvägen) in Stockholm, holding an Oldenburg-sized red toothbrush. Most of the circumstances about this photographer – who in point of fact was the one with whom Anita Ekberg shared the night after her wedding on May 5, 1956 in Florence – were for sure larger than life. “He was accredited to the Festival de Cannes for thirty years straight. Then you become legendary, and can behave exactly as he did, and he could go anywhere and everybody knew who he was,” explains Michel Hjorth.

 

“Movies alone could not establish the Festival as a worldwide stage for international film culture but press coverage of ‘events’ could,” argues Vanessa Schwartz in It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture. “At a pivotal moment in American domination of the international film market, the French-run Festival developed an international platform for the world’s films and film personalities. In Cannes, films and their stars had access to an unprecedented scope of publicity, disseminated by the increasingly photo-oriented mass international press. While studies of cultural diplomacy have underscored national chauvinism, rivalry, and the frigid battles of the Cold War, the history of the Festival describes the forging of a collaborative international film culture.”

 

The first Festival de Cannes opened on September 1, 1939 but had to be revoked after just one screening – it was the morning when the Nazis marched over Polish borders. Two days later the Second World War broke out. The Festival was revived in April 1946 as the world was trying to get back on its feet again. At the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, Lasch lost his good life in Prague, the privileged travelling, the boarding school in Switzerland and everything else. His middle brother managed to escape to London and the stateless Lasch arrived in Stockholm to establish a new life from next to nothing, starting as a window cleaner. His parents and his oldest brother were sent to a labour camp in Belarus where they were terminated thirty-six months later, a wound that Lasch would never recover from.

 

“Kary was very fond of his mother, they had a strong love for each other. Even as a child he said that she was his best model. I think that he was very original as a child. He knew six languages by heart, it could be said that his talent was complete,” Hjorth reflects. “He was expelled from almost every school that he attended because he made practical jokes that could end up in the most absurd situations.”

 

“Kary disliked his violin teacher in Switzerland so much that he slammed his instrument on the grand piano, and since then he never touched music – other than listening to Mozart, all the time. He knew everything about Mozart, the family background was like that. I understand that they were surrounded by a musical elite. The family had a summer villa, a big house in Kutná Hora [fifty kilometres east of Prague], and in the garden they had a train that went to a music pavilion. I never managed to find out about the dimensions of that train.”

 

Lasch was also fanatically fond of girls. He photographed 4,500 natural young beauties that he located everywhere, and he claimed that he fell in love with them all. In the January 1958 issue of the (since-long defunct) American monthly Coronet, there is a story of Lasch finding one of his dreamgirls on a boulevard in Paris, then quickly pulling out a chair from the nearest café to photograph this mademoiselle by the name of Yvonne Monlaur (who had just started her short career as an actress) in the middle of the street. These things had a much deeper meaning than pissing off motorists: this was essentially about the sense of time being paused during the moment when love and yes, yes lust fill your entire being.

 

“His early girl pictures had a clear sense of style with a compelling aesthetic and there is a graphic sense to it that is very nice. During his first nine years as a photographer, he had a woman who was more than twenty years younger, Lillemor Wredman, and she helped him with everything. They were everywhere. But he was chasing girls pretty much constantly and their relationship ended,” Hjorth elucidates. At times when the Benny Hill/”Yakety Sax”-side-of-the-matter took over Lasch’s photography, libido overturned artistry.

 

“He got tired of girls pretty quickly, that I realised. They became a kind of consumable and I don’t think that these pictures turned out well either. But when he has something where there is dignity, he was sharp as a tack. He said that he was disappointed in all the chicks because they would always let him down, but the truth is that he was just the same himself. He claimed that he was chronically unfaithful but I find that very strange because I didn’t think that he was particularly sexual. He was more pubertal in sex; his audacity was exceptional. The basis for this is to be elegantly impudent. But he always emphasised that he was very kind and those I have talked with attest to his gentlemanliness.”

 

“In Kary’s case I didn’t see charisma. He was more what you would call a manipulator, he was cunning but in a very good way. Kary was persistent. When he was shooting you can clearly see that it was a collaboration and that he had a very good, instinctive approach to portraiture. So he was able to capture these moments when the person is present, and not pretending to be present, and Kary is a great example of that. Over the years it became less and less possible for him to get his pictures out because in the 70s everything changed completely. He told me on various occasions that he was terribly disappointed that everyone thought that he only photographed girls when he had such fine pictures as those shown here at Fotografiska.”

 

During the last year of his life when he was slowly dying from cancer, Lasch was fully engrossed in securing his life’s work. The archive remained dormant for thirty years – stored at the picture and news agencies Pressens Bild and later TT, and was (not ideally) in the possession of a Finnish ex-model who worked as a journalist in Paris. Two books on Kary Lasch’s pictures were published in the 1990s by two of his agency friends, and old and inferior press prints circulated here and there but not much else transpired. Things suddenly began to spin when Michel Hjorth initiated the idea of making a major photobook on Lasch. With the help of the Governor of Turku in Finland, Hjorth and Christer Löfgren managed to capture the entire Kary H Lasch Archive of 21,600 sheets of negatives and unbox this treasure for the world.

 

Everything in the collection has been documented and digitalised. The pristine prints come with a unique certificate on the back, and with a mobile you are directed to a server in Switzerland where the authenticity is verified. From his early days in Stockholm – when Lasch challenged a photo editor in the Hasselblad store on Strandvägen, and in jest told him that he could do so much better than the editor’s pictures – till the end of his career when he carried out his work in a more hasty and careless manner, much of Lasch’s photography was marked by a slapdash attitude towards the technical side of his profession. He never bothered about things such as using a light meter or developing his rolls in an orderly fashion.

 

“Since I knew how bad, grey and blotchy the press photos were, I had the idea that we should bring his images up to the highest level that exists today,” resonates Hjorth. “The books from the 1990s have mimicked him in a sense that the reproductions look as if they are from the 1950s. There is such a quality in the material that you have to deal with.” The Golden Years: Photography by Kary H Lasch came out in 2021, and each theme – “Glory and Fame”, “The Years in Cannes” and “Moods and Humour” – is housed in its own physical book with pictures so alluring that they make you feel that there are more songs to be sung and bells to be rung.

 

It should probably be mentioned, however, that most of what can be read in these books is in dire need of editing. That said, there is a beautiful little piece by Joakim Strömholm, whose famous father Christer thought it would be a better idea for his son to improve his darkroom practices in Lasch’s bathroom (in his home at Brantingsgatan 30) than to join a friend on a ski trip to the Austrian Alps. It was one of those mornings in March 1965 that Lasch knocked on the bathroom door, carrying a tray full of breakfast delights together with the dread of the news brought by the morning paper: the coach with Joakim’s friend had been swallowed by a snowslide and everyone was dead.

 

“I remember him as kind, generous, mischievous, funny and very considerate,” adds Strömholm in a message. “For a 15-year-old it was like being in paradise, to be among all his negatives and pictures of gorgeous babes and famous actors. In a sense, he probably helped me when I started my own photography. His social skills and friendly forwardness were inspiring.”

 

In Bring on the Empty Horses (1975), David Niven’s second personal account of his life in films, the debonaire actor writes that “Hollywood was Lotus Land between 1935 and 1960 and bore little relationship to the rest of the world, but it was vastly exciting to be part of a thriving, thrusting ‘first-growth’ industry – the greatest form of mass entertainment so far invented.”

 

We are back in Lotus Land at Fotografiska, under the guidance of Herr Lasch. “Kary connects with the people he photographs, they feel the warmth when they smile and look at Lasch, he participates in their moment – and you sense it, regardless of age, I think. Equally, it is not a bad thing to experience a bit of a concentrate of the temper of this particular era that continues to influence much of our contemporary range of film, fashion and design,” replies Lisa Hydén, Director of Exhibitions at Fotografiska’s mothership, who has curated The Golden Years show with finesse and a sincere understanding of Kary H Lasch and his photographic flair.

 

It is easy to nod in agreement when the curator appreciates how Lasch “persistently won his photographic moments through perseverance, humour and mischief but still with respect, and how he as a social virtuoso with refinement had his eyes raised towards a kind of cosmopolitan horizon, despite the rather narrow Swedish confinements that he found himself in. Lasch was moreover street smart, and that is a good thing to be.”

 

After various attempts to have Kary Lasch shown at Fotografiska in Stockholm without even being replied to, Tobias Röstlund, Head of Picture Agency at TT Nyhetsbyrån, found a new way to unlock these doors when the agency’s News Flash: A Century of News opened at Fotografiska by the end of 2022. “Now that I had managed to meet the right people, I told them about Michel and Christer’s extraordinary work with Lasch’s pictures and the book that they had produced. And this eventually led to the exhibition, to everyone’s delight,” recounts Röstlund. “My ambition from the beginning was simply that more people would be given the opportunity to see his wonderful pictures from another, bygone era since they are worthy of being displayed in a large format, on fine photo paper.”

 

Lisa Hydén explains that “We chose, out of all the thousands of imaginable possibilities, to keep the selection focus that Michel and Christer had delineated in their book volume, the 1950s and early 60s. Then I wanted us to try to capture a little more of Kary’s playfulness in the exhibition. It felt like a possible way to bring the space a little closer to the feeling of being part of the swirling energy that he seems to have had around him. We tweaked it a bit, and asked our graphic designer at Studio Kunze to create a textual design that retained a basic element of elegance but also energy and merriment. Lasch expressed in interviews that he would have liked to exhibit more but the assignments and time ran faster, so here we had a great opportunity to make an impact and produce his prints magnified and emphasised.”

 

To hint-hint a bit of Kary Lasch’s star quality: picture a man who goes to Copenhagen to catch the night train to Stockholm because he knows that Sophia Loren is on that train and that he knows that her agent will let him knock on her door at 5:30 in the morning, and that the eternal woman will be delighted to see him again and allow him to photograph her in her black nightie. When Loren arrived in Stockholm (with two other actresses, Silvana Pampanini and Lea Massari) in December 1955 to attend an Italian film festival, she was met by the habitual throng of press photographers running after her railway carriage. There was also only one photographer in the whole world who could have taken the picture of Loren in her Grand Hôtel suite, elegantly posed at the tall window with a crowd outside and the Royal Castle across the water. That’s excellence.

 

“For foreign filmgoers, between the 1940s and 1960s, Italian female stars were exotic, fiery, passionate, beautiful and adult,” argues Stephen Gundle in Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy. “Whatever connotations they might have had for Italians, for English and American audiences they were anything but familiar girls-next-door and nor were they the sort of artificial product that the major Hollywood studios had been turning out for decades. Before all else, Italian stars appeared to be natural; they offered not the constructed sex appeal of the glamourised star, but a certain raw earthiness that seemed natural and unspoilt. To outsiders, Italy possessed the eternal appeal of an old civilisation and the fresh vibrancy of a country that, for all its problems, seemed basically dynamic and optimistic.”

 

Fellini had plenty of good things to say in that 1966 interview in Playboy: “I loathe collectivity. Man’s greatness and nobility consist of standing free of the mass. How he extricates himself from it is his own personal problem and private struggle.” We now live in a uniquely senseless time in human history. Graeme Turner in Understanding Celebrity Culture is effectively mild-mannered when he describes the dazzle of today’s imperious meh-celebrities and how they rattle in their cages for any kind of validation: “as the example of Kim Kardashian might suggest, most media pundits would agree that celebrities in the 21^st century excite a level of public interest that seems, for one reason or another, disproportionate”.

 

“Never touch your idols: the gilding will come off on your hands,” cautioned Gustave Flaubert in Madame Bovary (1856). One could only wish that “new” Fotografiska will keep clear of these rattlers with their cold energies who seem to be unable to escape the vacuum of their own personal irrelevance, and whose faces have often enough covered the walls ever since the opening in 2010 with the photographic misrepresentation of Annie Leibovitz. Kary H Lasch: The Golden Years is on the other hand Fotografiska when it spangles.

 

The stardust of yesterday exudes from lustrous medium- or small-sized prints, framed or frameless, while the soundtrack and the paraphernalia secure the mood in the later years of the 1950s. Here you encounter Gina Lollobrigida in Paris in 1951 after Lasch had placated her green-eyed husband Milko Škofič with a potent notion of “Slavic brotherhood”; wave farewell to Anita Ekberg and Anthony Steel at the Firenze Santa Maria Novella and wish them happy trails on their honeymoon; follow Frank Sinatra to the Gare de Cannes in 1955; play boules with Gene Kelly and some happy Côte d’Azur locals; stay with Salvador Dalí in his pitchforked dream castle in Cadaqués in 1958 – or you can think about the chocolate sauce and the stabbing of Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960) while Anthony Perkins smiles at you.

 

In his book Glamour: A History, Stephen Gundle expresses how “Bardot struck a blow against some of the traditional canons of movie star glamour. She rejected the costly gowns and rigid formality of previous French stars and instead proposed a casual, yet sexy and glamorous, alternative that consisted of gingham dresses, Capri pants, and striped tops, that were left cheekily unbuttoned. Her imperfect, bottle blonde mane symbolised her casual, carefree manner. In an era when stiffness reigned, she offered a dream of emancipation and an image of unlimited desire. Bardot was hugely successful abroad but highly controversial at home.”

 

The first time that Kary Lasch photographed Brigitte Bardot was when he met the very young France Nuyen at the Festival in April 1953. The last time that he was close to BB was on the set of Une parisienne in 1957 where he had a small part playing himself (which is not in the film however). It is beyond question that Brigitte Bardot has embodied the Festival de Cannes like no one else, though Lasch found her “a little cheap, and I would almost say vulgar” when he tried to come to terms with her sexiness during the early years of her career.

 

The most beautiful picture in the show has nothing to do with stars, sunshine and provocative flesh. It is a beauty photographed in an Italian church with Lasch’s woman Lillemor Wredman in the centre of the perfectly composed Hasselblad square, and there is a toned-down holiness to everything about it: to this woman standing at the inside of the entryway in her white blouse and what seems to be a pencil skirt, her posture is lovely; to the soul of the carved stones and the three very different columns to her left; to the light and darkness enhanced by the window opening to her right; to the man in his chair below her who is deep in thought. This is the point of great photography – a heartening portrait of a woman (and an old man) united with the serene vivacity of life itself.

 

“The last time I met Kary Lasch was in 1992 in Gothenburg at the Swedish Exhibition and Congress Centre in connection with an exhibition of his pictures. And there, between Brigitte Bardot, Gina Lollobrigida and Britt Ekland, was little old me. In the evening Kary was travelling home and I followed him to the Central Station. Kary looked tired, his ever so impish eyes had faded a bit. I asked him how he was feeling and he replied, ‘You see, darling, the geezer is getting a bit old,’” remembers Birgitta Lindberg in Mitt jordenruntäventyr med den berömde fotografen Kary H Lasch (My Around-the-World Adventure with the Famous Photographer Kary H Lasch). “I can still feel his warm hug that night. He never told me that he was seriously ill. Kary died on August 27, 1993.”

 

In the beginning of the 1970s, Lasch’s friend Gordon McLendon, who owned the well-known Southfork Ranch outside Dallas, sponsored their worldwide adventure during which ten thousand pictures were taken of Lasch’s new young model Birgitta in an endless array of beachwear in Singapore, Sumatra, Jakarta, Borneo, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tahiti, Jamaica, Acapulco, Dallas and Los Angeles, and the famous photographer seemed to have friends or make new ones in every paradise and at every luxury hotel they came to. “Kary was phenomenal at conversing in foreign languages. He would run around like a ferret to make sure that he didn’t miss anything,” writes Lindberg. “I say it again, he was indefatigable! That one person can have so much energy! I don’t get it.”

 

“Kary also had many other sides,” Lindberg reveals in a handwritten letter. “Deep down he was very vulnerable, sensitive and also lonely. When I was in Stockholm recently for his exhibition at Fotografiska, I visited his grave and saw the simplest tombstone imaginable, it cried out: so lonely. Nothing about him being a master photographer. Nothing. It was painful. Kary H Lasch died alone.”

 

Baudelaire’s recommendation to the sensitive souls of the world was that “One must be drunk always … If you would not feel the burden of time that breaks your shoulders and bows you to the earth, you must intoxicate yourself increasingly.” Aside from his fondness for Mon Chéri pralines, Lasch never touched alcohol. But the unequalled and amazing way he lived his life was exactly like that, in spite of the fact that he didn’t “score” each time.

 

In a sweet letter to his favourite model Birgitta Lindberg in December 1977, Kary H Lasch thanks her “for everything that has been and has not been”.

© Kary H Lasch/Bridgeman Images.

Kary H Lasch: The Golden Years at Fotografiska in Stockholm through April 14, and at Fotografiska in Tallinn, April 19–September 8, 2024.

BRUNO EHRS: HOT WATER MUSIC

Bruno Ehrs, Sturebadet. July 19, 1986 (from The Stockholm Suite). © Bruno Ehrs.

It is surprising what beauty can offer when you are trying to create the images with a kind of awareness.

 

– Bruno Ehrs

 

A boy is running across a flowery meadow on a cloudless day – blissful, freckled, radiant, captured by the wonderment of life. The camera starts to pan his face in profile as the youngster rises to the sky in a burst of laughter. “Mama, there’s a cuckoo in the woods,” he says when he touches down by the river next to her. Mama wipes the sweat off her forehead and smiles at the sight of her son plunging the face in her bucket of water to drink. She is dead of course. The boy and the viewers are thrown out of the dream and hurled into a world at war. It’s nighttime for the star.

 

What was meant as a singular thoroughgoing afternoon interview with the affable Swedish photographer Bruno Ehrs (then half reclining on my sofa due to back problems after a life of carrying camera equipment the size of Atget’s) on matters such as the elevated quality of his image-making, the emergence of his own designed daylight studio (in the country’s largest island Gotland) and his “ninth-and-a-half” exhibition evolved into a ten-hour-long course of conversations about his all-encompassing fondness for the photographic medium – and this is what he shows me on his mobile across the table with refreshments in the café at Fotografiska in Stockholm, and it is late September: Tarkovsky’s perfect opening scene in Ivan’s Childhood (1962).

 

“I want my images to be a bit like an ABC book,” Ehrs (b 1953) explains, “that it should be completely obvious as to why the photographer has placed the tripod exactly there, and if things are going very well the pictures shall also pick up sustenance from the subconscious. And there mustn’t be any doubt because with my aesthetics I want to guide the viewer into what I find so mysterious and exciting. Therefore, I try to create my pictures with great simplicity. The word ‘simple’ is misleading because life is in chaos, everywhere, and how can you make a simple picture? It is really difficult. I don’t want to photograph life as it looks, but I photograph it as I want it to look.”

 

There is a quote by Alfonso X of Castile (the 1200s) – “If I had been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better arrangement of the Universe” – among the sheets of questions and they all remain unlooked at, although answered in depth since Ehrs’s unusual perceptiveness makes him a pleasure to record. Master filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville talked about the necessity for an artist to be “opocentric” (a word he made up, yes), which for certain is the kind of determination you see in Bruno Ehrs’s work as he has devoted himself to the spirit of photography and the kind of vigilance that goes all through his opus.

 

The day before the opening of Bruno Ehrs and Tom Wolgers: Stockholm – Pieces of a City, Fotografiska’s gallery below is a muddle of ladders, tools, workbenches, some glass-covered prints spread out on the floor, and technicians running about with their settled duties. And this is a type of chaos that actually beguiles Ehrs, massively. Especially so when the first speaker is plugged in with his treasured old chum Tom Wolgers’s (1959–2020) music which he composed for their twin collaborations in the 1980s – Stockholmsutställningen 1982 (The Stockholm Exhibition 1982) and Stockholmssviten (The Stockholm Suite) in 1987 – and which have been brought back for the first time as an intermingling twofer that is a treat for one’s eyes and ears.

 

“I am back to the key element in my photography, a theory that has followed me all my life – that I have a mood, a feeling within me. I want to convey that emotion to others, and how do I manage to express in pictures what is sensed in my whole body?” Ehrs reflects. “My wish, when my photography is at its best, is that I will be able to create an image with a mood that can be shared by the viewer. It is by then that I have succeeded. And this is how it is with my Stockholm pictures at Fotografiska. I hope that my pictures will move the visitor into that state of mind.”

 

“Many believe that Tom Wolgers and my first exhibition in 1982 was one of the clearest signs that a new type of photography was on the way. There are simply two main things in this: one is the one that I naturally think is great fun because it was the first time in Swedish photo history that a photographer collaborated with someone from another discipline. And we had no idea, Tom and I, but we just wanted to do it. The second is that this exhibition is an early indication that the then-dominant documentary photography breed, usually left-leaning, had to step aside. And that was what was so provocative. I think that people were unprepared for it and that they didn’t understand it. I also know that people who had opinions on my pictures never saw the exhibition.”

 

Edward Hopper, an artist who Ehrs reveres, was at one time asked by a boring man what he was after. These kinds of questions often produce the best ever replies and Hopper’s was: “I’m after me.” It’s no secret that Bruno Ehrs always has been after “me”, which is the grand opposite of trying to be popular and uninspiring, and this is why the vapidity of DDR-Sweden and the adherents of hollow social realism – who maintained that putting a photograph in a frame was “bourgeois” – would finally crash and burn along with their disregard for human flourishing.

 

One of the victories at Fotograficentrum, where The Stockholm Exhibition 1982 was on show from late November to late December that year, was that the nation’s Museum of Modern Art, Moderna, purchased eight of these prints from the gallery. But the largest one is by all means the quality of these portraits of Folkhemmet’s prettiest stars, the (sort of) New Romantics of Stockholm, pictures of dream and poetry that will surely never fade to grey.

 

Drottninggatan (Queen Street) is the artery in Ehrs’s early life as a professional photographer. Across the street just slightly to the right from Drottninggatan 86, where he lived and had a studio, was a clever waterhole called Bistro Bohème (that somewhat remained its fumbling Swedishness by the incorrect accent aigu spelling) where Gucci rhymed with Fiorucci and the angulate pastel furnishings were a combination of 1920s Constructivism and 1980s Memphis Group. Though Ehrs didn’t really socialise with Bistro Bohème’s clientele, he liked these people a lot and was fascinated by their looks. He asked one after the other if he could photograph them the next day at one o’clock, often on a Saturday or Sunday, and always in exactly the same attire as the night before.

 

“Bistro Bohème was immense fun. It was completely crazy because it was a Belgian architect called Guy Monseau who did the whole interior. It was extremely postmodern with tall wooden chairs that were impossible to sit on, but they put you in a good mood. The chairs were light green or light purple or light blue in that novel postmodernist style. Bohème was a bit odd, new and different. I lived alone and couldn’t cook so I ate their business lunch there every day. In the evenings it was a little more complicated because I could never afford to both drink and dine, and for the most part I only had beer.”

 

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg contended in his late-1700s Waste Books that “For us the most entertaining surface in the world is that of the human face” and he is eternally right. For each individual in Ehrs’s series of portraits, made with a 35mm camera and a roll of film, there was a new location that he had opted for in advance, on Drottninggatan or close by, to perfectly frame the notion that he had about this person. Ehrs says that he longed to photograph these people, “but at the same time I didn’t want to know anything about them, perhaps for fear that they were not what I hoped. I think that I can say that I have such sensitive tentacles so for me that is enough.”

 

The photographer was only twenty-nine at the time when he made these pictures that are so strikingly appealing in tone and style – yet full of conscious photo law don’ts, like a drainpipe coming out of a young man’s head or the one where the parking meters are voguing in front of another guy just to steal the attention. (“I use that aesthetics as something positive to enhance the mood of presence and present time.”) A precious picture in this series, that consists of fourteen prints at Fotografiska, is the portrait of Cecilia (Cecilia, Student, Drottninggatan 86) in a chequered dress and a thoughtful disposition, sided by an almost robotlike and street-rough control panel and a human ink blot, the shadow of Ehrs’s assistant. A photographer draws by definition with light, but a really great one similarly knows what to do with the shadows. Ehrs treats them like tangible delights.

 

Also from Drottninggatan 86 is the portrait of Madeleine in which the contrasty drama of light and shade on her face creates a captivating penumbra. Madeleine Thor, who worked at Stockholm’s first Italian ice cream parlour Pacific and at the dashing clothes store Gul & Blå after school, describes Bistro Bohème as “a second living room for everyone when we were young and hadn’t moved out from our parents or lived in small flats”. As for the portrait, she was used to stand in front of the camera for tests and lights since she assisted a commercial photographer at the time: “I’m sensitive to light, I was born with sunglasses, so the streak of light over my eye meant that I had to close my eyes to open them when Bruno told me.” Fotografiska has a blow-up of this portrait so enormous that the lady in the picture initially failed to notice it when she arrived at the vernissage.

 

British photographer Eric de Maré argues in his book Architectural Photography that “photography is unlike any other creative medium, and it is particularly potent when dealing with architecture because through selection to make firm compositions by judicious choice of viewpoint, of lighting, and of lens of particular focal length, and in processing and printing, it can make personal comment – most often by isolating a detail from its surroundings and building a disciplined structure on its own right within the frame. The camera can select significant, organised form from the general chaos of the world, and in black and white it can formalise reality in a range of tones between black and white that creates a kind of abstract.”

 

There is art in Bruno Ehrs’s version of architectural photography made in the mid-1980s so there is likewise personal comment, and more of those fine things that de Maré is talking about in the thirty-nine other pictures at Fotografiska – and for the second time Ehrs and Tom Wolgers developed a piece together for ears and eyes on the basis of Stockholm in a different light. “My relationship with Stockholm is really strong. I sometimes think to myself that I am a hometown photographer,” says Ehrs who has been all over the world in his profession. “There has always been a great interest in Stockholm in my life. I am still taken by Stockholm and I always have thoughts in my head about documentations that I would like to make.”

 

One such documentation was The Stockholm Suite which premiered at the Moderna in 1987. Its guiding idea is described as “a celebration of the vacant Sunday city when everyone you know seems to be somewhere else”. Ehrs tells that “In the portraits for The Stockholm Exhibition 1982 I chose the city’s objects as a photographic backdrop. I was driven by the idea that the city served as an unconscious designer of the portraits’ settings, in all its brutal simplicity and beauty. For The Stockholm Suite I wanted to depict the modern city with as much clarity and distinctness as possible, far off from romantic sentimentality.” Both of these series are monochrome – because as Ehrs states, “The magic of black and white photography is that reality is in colour.”

 

Bruno Ehrs loves the tactility of a print that originates from a large-format camera negative. The Stockholm Suite was made with a Linhof Technika IV with a Rodenstock lens and 9 x 12 sheet film, “and you can make tilt–shift restitutions so that the lines turn parallel. But it is also complicated because when you look at the ground glass, the image is upside down and mirrored, so it is incredibly difficult to work with these cameras, you have to redo the image in your head,” he explains.

 

“The Moderna exhibition was meant to be on display for one month but was extended over the summer, four months. It was a dramatically different reception, and we had become more mature. Tom himself has told me that The Stockholm Suite is the best single work that he has done, while he thought the music for The Stockholm Exhibition was a bit childish and ill-conceived. A lot had happened during these years, photography had also changed a lot. The aggressive tone against doing something different was no longer there at all.” The 1970s had to end at some point, even in Sweden.

 

Wolgers’s contribution to The Stockholm Suite consists of rearranged sound recordings of the disconcerted harmonies of the city – metro sounds, water sounds, motorway sounds, and so on and so forth – that are wholly melded with his predominant synthesiser compositions which form a classic sonic atmosphere, with structures assumed from both French Impressionism and 1980s art music. (His two works with Ehrs have just been rereleased on a double CD.) The musician and the photographer met at a party at Gärdet in Stockholm in the spring of 1982, they had similar preferences and loved the same kinds of artists and music (like the Coltrane-y side of jazz), and became the closest of friends till Ehrs’s first son was born in 1986.

 

“The thing is that I was so fond of my family that when Tom and I were out together, I was looking at the watch and longed to go home. As intensely as we had socialised, just as intensely did we not socialise anymore. I absolutely do not regret that decision, but I wished that he could have understood the situation better.” By then a third collaboration, that would have concluded their trilogy on Stockholm, was in the making. This involved a circumstance on the greensward by the Maritime Museum with a string quartet performing a purely classical piece by Wolgers to an Ehrs slideshow projected on a giant screen. “That show would have been about the city’s signs and symbols, the city’s nature morte. I never got around to make a single picture for it.”

 

“I don’t take pictures, I make pictures, and that is a huge difference. A skilled press photographer sees things that are about to happen, and when they happen, he is there to take the picture in action. That photographer is not me, but I have an inner image and I physically feel it in my whole body when I achieve it. And then I do not need to take another picture. I feel like an athlete who is about to run two hundred metres, and then I have to put everything aside that has to do with ordinary life. I want to be reset and empty before a new task. My wife has many times said that when I put the tripod down, I change and become a different person. I have learned this self-discipline. In large productions, all one hundred and fifty pictures must be good, and that nurtures you in some way. And I have benefitted from this discipline, that I decide on an order, when I do my own art projects.”

 

Three hundred pictures in all were made for The Stockholm Suite. This series is pensive too but in another way from The Stockholm Exhibition 1982 since it’s practically void of people. The Suite is a meditation on the somnambulistic city in its Sunday robe, entangled in the geometry of surfaces, shapes and proportions, the stuff that so much amuse him. The Suite is near in mood of being in a foreign land, a bit like an old tumbleweed Western with the Americana stripped off, or the ending in Antonioni’s L’eclisse (1962) in which a desolate suburban part of Roma is what it is, yet not at all with the director’s mysterious and poetical montage of images. Ehrs says that the great thing about photography “is that you do the impossible. Photography can stop time and at that particular moment it actually looked that way.”

 

There are pictures at Fotografiska that show some evidence of human life, like the vast parking garage with no cars but some tyre tracks in the snow; or the shadowy essence of a figure who is walking by an Alfa Romeo Spider and behind is a humongous wall, a backdrop of rough-textured bricks with a bit of the dreamy raggedness of Neorealismo; or the two he-and-she doors, marked “Private” and “Ladies”, that are having a hushed conversation in a defunct nightclub for art. Or the one where an apparition is walking straight into the picture when the photographer is assumed to be capturing the Berlin Wall-y backside of Kulturhuset (the House of Culture) which has produced a particular outcome that is strange, beautiful, out of the common and contrary to regulations.

 

An empty street, a traffic sign on a refuge, the huge corner surfaces of a building and the Hopperesque shadows – that is Klara Östra Kyrkogata. August 28, 1985, and as Ehrs was standing there to make his Sunday picture (on a day that was in fact a Wednesday) “this guy appeared and stood guard. He looked at me and then he saw what I was doing. I took the picture and waved at him. He waved back, then left with his plastic bags with strong beer.”

 

A gem in this series is a picture with a lot of dissimilar elements, like the deserted trolley cart that casts its shadow on an empty board for newspaper placards where someone has spraypainted “Trousers, Skirt, Trousers, Skirt, Trousers”, and this thing is just a bedlam of nothingness and all the same a symphony of significance composed of things considered ugly and boring and not worthy of consideration. This picture is implicitly anchored in the pure-natured photography of the 1920s and 30s.

 

“Without [Albert] Renger-Patzsch, I would never have experienced this. After all, he first published a book that has the best name in the world – Die Welt ist schön [1928] – meaning, the world is beautiful. You cannot beat that drama,” explains Ehrs who is an avid collector of vintage photobooks. “This I have come across many times when I have made photographs that I only later, and never when I am fully engaged in the photography, can sense that I probably never would have made that picture if I hadn’t looked at those photographs or the paintings that I admire so much.”

 

“There is something tender about sitting with a book in one’s arms and the photobook is like an exhibition, however in a slightly smaller format. If you are interested in form, printing and typefaces, browsing through a photobook is a great journey. I have been having fun trying to get hold of some of these old valuable books from the Weimar period in particular. I have two first editions of [Karl] Blossfeldt and I even like the way they smell. The book is like a kind of company, or like a mood carrier,” Ehrs maintains.

 

“I regard these photographers, my heroes, a bit like the angels in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire [1987] who circumambulate despite that we humans cannot see them. On occasions when you are pondering, are sad, think about something, the angel comes and sits next to you and puts his arm around you, and all of a sudden you feel much better. And for this reason, I believe that these people that I have come to know through these beautiful books have deeply ingrained me, to help me. They are my friends. It is just that they do not know it.”

 

Pretty miraculously Bruno Ehrs has managed to repossess his first camera, a Canon FT QL, that he bought during a summer school holiday before a trip to Sunny Beach in Bulgaria with his big sister. When the young Ehrs had made this purchase in the city, he just couldn’t contain himself on his way back home to Årsta (in the southern part of Stockholm) so he got off his bicycle after a few hundred metres, sat down under a statue in Kungsträdgården (the King’s Garden), rejoiced in the scents of his new tool, set the shutter speed to a second and listened to the sound of the exposure time over and over again. And he thought to himself that this is life.

 

“In order to succeed as a photographer and make images that have meaning, you must possess a combination of being an artist and being an engineer. I know truly great artists, they have all embraced the artistic position, but they cannot photograph. The common thread is that most photographers are technically interested,” Ehrs implies. “I never became a photographer to experience the world, I became one because I had an interest in photography. I am constantly longing to make a really good picture, that is my journey.”

 

To be an excited young man with a camera was one thing, however becoming a photographer was not Ehrs’s first choice when he was still in school. He applied to the School of Journalism in Stockholm, not to become a journalist but some kind of writer, but didn’t pass the tests. His father, who was an engineer, had a Voigtländer camera. In his early teens Ehrs biked to the Klara quarters with his pals to photograph the brutally scarred midtown on Sundays, which was the day of the week when they could roam freely amongst the boy-world remnants of old Stockholm. Ehrs got a Durst 301 enlarger and set up a darkroom in a boxroom in the basement of the apartment building. But it took some time for him to understand that it is only the coated side of the photo paper that is receptive to light.

 

Something substantial happened to Ehrs when his father’s highly religious relatives from up north gave them a book titled Bilder av Nådens barn (Pictures of the Children of Grace, 1963) “which is no comedy, but it meant a lot to me. We had mostly technical books at home, and all those pictures were comprehensible, but when I was holding Sune Jonsson’s photobook I didn’t understand the story of the pictures. It was the first time that it occurred to me that there was a kind of beauty and delight in the incomprehensible. And the same thing happened when I saw Christer Strömholm’s book Poste restante [1967]. I remember sitting on the floor by the photo shelf in Årsta Library and being almost obsessively shocked by the incomprehensibility of the images – you felt something that gripped your insides, but it was impossible to analyse as a boy. Both books were probably decisive for me becoming a photographer.”

 

There was a new assignment every week at the photo school in Solna (Stockholm). Since the student Ehrs’s dedication to photography was somewhat overenthusiastic and (in his own description) pretty juvenile, he always seemed to do more than was asked for but not quite what his teachers requested. One icy spring he travelled as far as he could go in the Stockholm archipelago with his Rolleiflex and ten rolls of film. After he had collected the developed rolls in a brown box from a photo shop, Ehrs was sitting on the metro one day looking through the slides with the aid of the lights in the carriage.

 

Facing him was a charming man dressed in a worn lambswool sweater, a Harris Tweed blazer and a knitted bow tie. “And he seemed so kind and smiled so much at me. When I looked up, he looked at me, and I said, ‘Do you want to have a look?’ When we reached the Old Town, he suddenly asked, ‘Are you a photographer?’ ‘No, I’m in photo school.’ ‘Do you want to become a photographer?’ ‘I want nothing more,’ I said.” The gentleman was none other than the famous Stockholm photographer Lennart af Petersens who was in charge of the photo department at the Stockholm City Museum.

 

Ehrs was hired that summer as a repro photographer, a job that was marked by its everyday sameness – both because of the procedure of the task and that he didn’t like the mediocre quality of the pictures that needed to be duplicated. But then there started to appear some pictures “with an entirely different shimmer, an entirely different light, an entirely different aura”. The author of this decidedly particular work is Henry B Goodwin who turned photography into an accepted artform in Sweden, via Pictorialism. Ehrs has a handsome collection of Goodwin prints and has made two books and an exhibition about this peculiar go-getter from Munich who nearly became a professor at Oxford.

 

In 1978, Ehrs received a phone call from a man who had just seen his Solna Library exhibition of the roundhouses in that part of town. Lars Peder Hedberg was a creative whose objective was a desire to infuse Stockholm with a metropolitan sense of the world and Ehrs was recruited for the launch of a truly impressive magazine, Sthlm City, even if his engagement would be limited to doing basic photo jobs. “But I ended up in an editorial office where the phones were ringing and where there were large Hans Gedda prints on the talented art director Tom Hedqvist’s desk. The owners shut down the magazine after four months, however, and then I got a little sick to my stomach because this was not what I had hoped for. It then turned out that the cleaning lady and I were the only ones with permanent employment.”

 

By the end of the first week as a fully-salaried unemployed, Ehrs received another important call from an editor at the girlie glitz magazine Veckorevyn who had mistaken Hans Gedda’s Sthlm City work for being his, and she asked Ehrs to fly to Paris the next day. “So we went to Paris and I was so damn lucky because I had some model friends, and when we got there we were invited to the opening of a disco called Les Bains Douches and it was Paris’s Studio 54 at the time.”

 

“When I came back to Stockholm, the editor-in-chief told me that she had never heard of a photographer and journalist returning with ten features in a week. She wanted to hire me on a contract, and it paid twice as much as the last job – and it was the same employer! Being a photographer at Veckorevyn with their slightly silly coverage was not quite what I had in mind, but the circumstances made me a bit fond of the free food, the parties and the pretty girls. Well, I was at that age.”

 

That kind of party ended when the Bonnier Publishing Group brought in their noted-switch-notorious mender to save the magazine; a Gertrude Stein-like woman of a seriously frightening disposition, “and let me put it this way: she had more male sex hormones than I do. She was like an attacking eagle and I was not the slightest cocky at that point. She kindly asked if I wanted a cup of coffee, and I thought to myself that this is going to be bad.” Her message was that the next thing that Ehrs was expected to do was to go straight to the elevator, press “G” and not ever again enter the building. “It was then that I decided to never be employed again in my life. It was 1981 and that is how it happened.” Many years later they met by chance in the café when Fotografiska had opened in Stockholm. This time it was friendly and Ehrs thanked her for saving his life.

 

In 1979, Ehrs shot Andy Warhol. He was going to New York together with a famous man of culture to cover a host of people of renown in the city, but was promptly left to his own devices. Luckily Leo Castelli found the “cute Norwegian boy” to his liking so Ehrs got his pass to Warhol and the Union Square Factory, and also went on a cruise one night in Warhol’s limousine to places like Studio 54 where small glasses of sponsored Absolut Vodka were served up during every fifteen-minute stop they made. The white t-shirt that Warhol had written his phone number on and “Call me” was obliterated one day when Ehrs’s mother decided to put it in the washer. And later on, there was a big eruption of soup inside his camera cabinet when one of the signed Campbell’s cans had soured up. But who needs souvenirs with these kinds of memories?

 

That feature was for the abovementioned publishing house’s new crown jewel Månadsjournalen, and this was the fecund era when Ehrs started to collaborate with some of Sweden’s best writers – especially the legendary Bobo Karlsson who had co-founded Sthlm City and who was so fed up with Sweden that he relocated to New York. Ehrs says that besides his own family, there’s no one who has taught him as much about how to act as a photographer as Bobo Karlsson. New York was ever so often Ehrs’s second city during that period. He describes NYC in the early 1980s as a really chaotic, littered and dangerous place, “but at the same time noisy and fun, and people danced like never before with an exuberance that would abruptly end with the emergence of Aids”.

 

“The best thing that can happen to me is when someone opens a magazine and says that Bruno must have done this,” Ehrs rejoices. One thing that sets his pictures apart is how he deals with proportions. He also turns every picture that he makes nowadays into 4:5, regardless. “And this is very interesting: you kind of make different pictures with different proportions. The most complicated is the square format. It was never intended by Hasselblad that one should make square images, but Victor Hasselblad photographed birds and the whole idea was to focus it on the centre cross and press. A print in portrait or landscape mode is then made in the darkroom. If you try to create images in the square format, it is extremely complicated because the motifs have a tendency to fall if you are not skilled with your composition.”

 

He loved the transition to digital photography in the late 1990s and claims that it was one of his greatest experiences since his photo school days. At that time, and for the next twenty years, Ehrs brought quality and art to the world of business. “The advertising jobs were what funded my private projects, so I went into self-sponsorship. It is of course a different type of visual language that exists in the advertising world, and I also like it very much. What I had never understood in my early years as a photographer was that if you are lucky, you can make huge amounts of money.”

 

“I saw photography as a low-paying profession. Suddenly it was the opposite with advertising: you made too much money. I also got an agent. Another interesting thing is that I joined an image agency early on. By then I had so many pictures from destinations. But I have never been out to rake it in, the drive has always been to make really great photography. I kind of want to make pictures that I myself would like to see.”

 

The National Library of Sweden lists 143 books with Bruno Ehrs’s name. Since 2014, he has photographed nine impressive tomes of opulence for Flammarion: three luxury brands, four French châteaus and two Italian villas. Other commissioned works of note are his photographs in the book on Dior’s Château de La Colle Noir in the southeast of France and the one on Cartier’s jewellery.

 

Before Stockholm turned 750 years old in 2002, Ehrs received an invitation from Kulturhuset to photograph the Stockholmer. He got the idea for The Embracement one day when his youngest son fell asleep with a smile on his face on the metro – that special existential luxury of resting one’s head so placidly on a parent’s shoulder. The series shows famous Stockholmers at rest in the bosom of the city, and the most famous of them all relaxes on the stairs on the Skeppsholmen island opposite the Royal Castle. Just when Ehrs had loaded his camera with the sixth 8 x 10 cassette, a white swan pedalled past the King of Sweden to make the whole arrangement picture perfect.

 

As Joseph W Molitor accurately writes in his book Architectural Photography, “Ideas are what lift a picture from a mere record to an exciting illustration. Ideas come to those whose daily custom it is to generate them, for man’s imagination runs best when in constant use. One might think that the photographer’s equipment consists of cameras, films, lights, and lenses. In reality a photographer’s major tool is his ability to use such hardware in imaginative ways.”

 

“I am not a photographer who walks around with a camera to capture the present moment,” Ehrs explains. “No matter how difficult it is to photograph, no matter how difficult it is to make the pictures that you want to make, the tone is the hardest thing to establish. I often figure that out when I am lying in the bathtub because then all the pain disappears. It is about an occupational injury to my back because I have worn out my body. When I arrive at this tone everything is very loose, then when I start shooting, I stick to the theme that I think that I have originated from the beginning.”

 

One of Bruno Ehrs’s favourite photographers is Keld Helmer-Petersen, the Danish maestro of colour (but also of extracting graphical forms from a world concealed to those with eyes wide shut), and Ehrs and his wife had the great pleasure to travel to Copenhagen one weekend to meet the old master in his home. Helmer-Petersen’s guiding quote came from Paul Éluard – “There is another world, but it is in this one” (or in beautiful French: Il y a assurément un autre monde, mais il est dans celui-ci) – and this is surely a valid viewpoint for Ehrs and his work as well.

 

(Just make sure to revisit the other jocund dream scene in Ivan’s Childhood, the one with the boy and his sister on a flatbed truck full of apples in the rain against a film negative background, and all the fruits gushing out on the river bank for the horses to savour.)

 

When asked if he’s sure that the ideas behind his almost-there daylight studio in an old outhouse in Gotland (situated beside his other house on the northern part of the island) are going to work, Ehrs replies, “No, I am not.” He says that Gotland was a love at first sight. “My whole family comes from northern Jämtland. It is a terrible landscape. It is beautiful in a sense but it is incredibly dismal with big black lakes and spruce forests. Gotland is an abundance of beauty, history and culture. The light is so special because there are no mountains or tall trees; the sky is so present in a way that is second to none in Sweden. And the island is a limestone cliff so the white limestone lights up. In autumn, the sun has heated up this entire rock so autumn in Gotland is warmer than it is on the mainland.”

 

He found his dream outhouse in the woods, returned to it a number of times during his and his spouse’s many bicycle tours, then bought it from the farmer who butchered its corners with a chainsaw in order to load it on a vehicle for a hardly legitimate move. “The farmer wanted to hit the main road and the house was so wide that oncoming cars could not pass. A car drove into the ditch but it was no worse than it was back on the road again. At one point we had an approach with Bus 61 and the driver had to reverse it into another road for us to pass, and people filmed us. On one occasion, a telephone line crossed the road and the farmer had to climb atop of the roof and push the line with a broom. Then the farmer and his son started arguing when they were going to lower the house onto the newly-laid foundation, and the whole house started to creak and sway.”

 

Another Danish artist that Bruno Ehrs is much fascinated by is the fantastic painter Vilhelm Hammershøi who, in Ehrs’s words, “has the black belt in empty rooms” and the restful Sunday mood that he so much values. There is a building in Gotland that hasn’t been in use for a hundred years called the Chapel of the Hjorterians, and that was a rare visit that reminded Ehrs of both Hammershøi and his own anticipation of creating a daylight studio.

 

The repurposed old outhouse has been furnished with a big window facing the northern light that is so favoured by Ehrs. The inner walls are painted in the darkest of greys and everything that might disturb the peace is placed in dark grey boxes. In this space of thirty-two square metres of serenity and creativity, Ehrs will make still lives that might possibly enter the excitement of diptychs and triptychs because there are future exhibitions ahead. The sole picture in here is a portrait of Yvonne, his wife.

 

It’s daytime for the photographer.

Bruno Ehrs, Club Barbar. October 1985 (from The Stockholm Suite). © Bruno Ehrs.

Bruno Ehrs, Unknown. Barnhusgatan 1982 (from The Stockholm Exhibition 1982). © Bruno Ehrs.

 

Bruno Ehrs, Tunnelgatan, now Olof Palmes gata. September 18, 1985 (from The Stockholm Suite). © Bruno Ehrs.

Bruno Ehrs, The Backside of Kulturhuset. October 1986 (from The Stockholm Suite). © Bruno Ehrs.

Bruno Ehrs and Tom Wolgers: Stockholm – Pieces of a City through January 14, 2024 at Fotografiska in Stockholm.