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Larry Clark, New York City, Speedy and Barb. From the Teenage Lust series, 1968, © Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

Christer Strömholm, Shinohara, Hiroshima, ca 1961, © Christer Strömholm/Stromholm Estate.

Arthur Tress, Mother and son, Princeton, 1967, © Arthur Tress, www.arthurtress.com.

Arthur Tress, Boy in Mickey Mouse Hat, Coney Island, 1968, © Arthur Tress, www.arthurtress.com.

Moderna Museet
Skeppsholmen
+46 8 5195 5200
Stockholm
Reality Revisited.
Photography
from the Moderna Museet
collection
May 9-September 20, 2009

The second major photo exhibition at Moderna Museet in spring 2009 takes a look at the 1970s. More than 300 photos from the Moderna Museet collection cover major portfolios of work by photographers including Larry Clark, Duane Michals, Bill Owens, Eva Klasson, Anders Petersen, Arthur Tress and Melissa Shook. Other photographers are represented by a smaller number of images, and the exhibition is complemented by selected works by forerunners who have inspired and influenced their work.

The title of the exhibition alludes to the way photographers in the 1970s generally based their work on, or referred to, the reality they were living in. Many explored new ways of portraying real life — while others searched for ways of creating photos beyond the everyday. This exhibition reveals a progression from distinctly documentary projects in the early years of the decade, to the more subjective, surrealist-influenced or body-oriented subject matter towards the end of the 1970s.

The “documentary” concept was central during this period. A fundamental aspect of the genre is a trust in photography as a possibility to portray reality objectively, and the camera’s potential to reveal hidden social injustices. However, this precept began to be called in question, and many of the issues that preoccupied photographers in the 1970s are still being explored by contemporary practitioners: form and content, subjectivity and objectivity, art and politics.

All the featured photographers stem from the genre of classic black-and-white photography. Using different approaches, they applied the medium and developed their own styles of expression. After the Second World War, street photography and subjective photography experienced rising popularity, along with fashion photography. It became possible, again, to travel to the large cities, which grew into creative meeting places for the generation of photographers who embarked on their careers in the 1960s and experienced a climax before postmodern photo-based art came to the fore in the early 1980s.

The history of how the collection was created helps to explain the strong focus on American and Swedish photography in this exhibition. In 1971, Fotografiska Museet was inaugurated as an independent department of Moderna Museet. Several study tours were made to the USA by the curators in the mid-70s, resulting in major exhibitions and acquisitions. Fotografiska Museet was fully integrated with Moderna Museet in 1998, which thus obtained a rich photographic treasure.

Curator of the exhibition is Anna Tellgren.

Larry Clark, Billy Mann. From the Tulsa series, 1971, © Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

Anders Petersen, Ramona, 1968-1970, © Anders Petersen.

Nan Goldin, Couple in Bed, Chicago, 1977, © Nan Goldin, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.