NORWEGIAN DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY

What is Norwegian documentary photography today? Rather than offer an unambiguous answer to this question, the exhibition “Norwegian documentary photography” presents a broad range of contemporary photographers and their independent projects. When viewed together, these allow new interpretations of established documentary genres, showing the role of documentary photography in today’s expanded visual culture.

The exhibition features both well established and less established Norwegian photographers, and photographers who work in the art field as well as journalist photographers.

The combination of a confident and characteristic visual language with topical content has been the guiding selection principle for the exhibition. Beyond this, a common feature of the exhibited works is the way they explore the construction of identity through their focus on the relation between people and their environments. The main emphasis is on the point of intersection between national culture and the processes of international globalization. Many of the works take a stance on Norwegian identity in particular.

Whereas documentary photography has historically been associated with an objective and sober visual style in black and white, all the works in this exhibition are in colour. Several of the pictures also carry clear messages about the photographer’s subjective choices, thus challenging conventional ideas about documentary photography. For example, Oddleiv Apneseth has produced a series of staged group photographs showing both institutional and less visible social structures from the Jølster district. Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty has collected, edited and enlarged old amateur family photos showing the childhood years of gay men and women. Other projects are closer to photo journalism. Monica Larsen’s colourful images show the growth of a new attitude to urban leisure in Kigali, Rwanda. In their composition, colours and content, these pictures reveal the consequences of ongoing modernisation processes in Rwanda.

These trends are also apparent in the projects of the other photographers in the exhibition: Marcus Bleasdale, Eirik Brekke, Ellen Lande Gossner, Rune Johansen, Anne Stine Johnsbråten, Siv Johanne Seglem and Knut Egil Wang.

The exhibition is curated by Susanne Ø. Sæther in collaboration with Caroline Ugelstad at Henie Onstad Art Centre and is the result of a major grants initiative by the Freedom of Expression Foundation, Oslo, to promote Norwegian documentary photography. One of the conditions for the allocation of the grants was that projects should encourage social and political reflection. With this as its starting point, the exhibition shows ten of the projects that received production funding.

The book Norsk dokumentarfotografi i dag (Norwegian Documentary Photography Today) (Forlaget Press) presents all 38 winning projects that received funds from the Freedom of Expression Foundation programme for socially engaged photographers in 2007. The book will be launched in conjunction with the exhibition opening on 22 October 2009.

OCTOBER 22 – DECEMBER 13, 2009