Visit a Fotografiska’s Dream

Review of the contemporary photography gallery Fotografiska in Stockholm by guest blogger John Hudson.

When a tour guide recites automatically, “And to your left you can see Fotografiska, the world’s largest photographic museum” you think this is just another in the long Museet-list of Stockholm. Sweden’s capital is not only one of the world’s most beautiful cities, it also has a museum for everything.

But wait. As the tour boat glides past an industrial building in the Art Nouveau style built in 1906 and recently restored you realise this could be something special. It’s large but elegant; the quayside on which it sits is wide and filled with light. It’s new. It’s a little bit out of the way, offering big views across Stockholm and as we get closer I can see large windows on the top floor. I want get up there and take a look.

From Gamla Stan, the old centre of Stockholm, it’s about a fifteen minute walk. A large ferry has drawn close to the quayside but that just adds to the sense of to and fro, the busy port built over fourteen islands. Some ice is still floating around in the water. It’s April, crocuses are pushing mauve and yellow into the air; the winters here are long and deeply cold.

Is Fotografiska the world largest photo museum? I don’t know. But it is very impressive. It opened in May 2010. It has rotating exhibitions, a bookshop, a cafe, seminar facilities and it is an active collector of new work. The facilities are no-expense-spared. All information is presented on HD TVs… banks of them and certain exhibitions take place on them, rotating images, written and spoken commentary and plenty of onscreen space and silence.

The big exhibition spaces are beautifully conceived, essentially grey and white with hugely flexible lighting. The plans are flexible to incorporate small cinemas to allow for films and presentations. The bookshop is well stocked and even the toilets are super-slick (individual white cotton hand-towels stacked in black pigeon-holes by the wash-hand basins).

There were three principle exhibitions for my visit. All first-class. On the ground floor was a big Albert Watson retrospective. Images of Kate Moss and Alfred Hitchcock side by side, and some equally effective landscapes from the States, the glove of Tutankhamen (the oldest glove in the world, Albert tells us in the accompanying film), and a triptych around the Passion. If you thought Albert Watson was just Vogue covers think again. Of course Albert is a Scot, and living as I do part of the time in Scotland, the retro gave me more than just images – it gave me a kind of cultural thermometer.

Another place I live is France and guess what? Sarah Moon, on show on floor two, is one of France’s most renowned contemporary photographers, filmmakers, and artists. A real tour de force this show – part fairy-tale, part nightmare. I kept on looking over my shoulder in the dimly lit space from where the images seemed to press against the psyche.

The other big show was Intended Consequences by Jonathan Torgovnik. Here the public were visibly in shock. Revisiting Rwanda 12 years after the genocide, the exhibition’s narrative of machetes, rape and domination contrasts with the images of mothers with children. The accompanying film interview (very well shot) offered a further socio-political dimension.

Not wishing to end on horror, I have to mention the café. Remember those windows I mentioned? They are photographs, their landscape format offering neatly cropped views across Stockholm no matter where you stand. Brilliant! I held out for a window-side table and watched the city moving with an almost dreamlike rhythm. A huge Baltic ferry set sail and slid by towards Helsinki. Cormorants and gulls flurried in its wake. I could see the National Museum far across the water. The old and the new and so much in between.

You can get to Stockholm easily and cheaply by air. Don’t forget your camera…

Visit the Fotografiska website (available in Swedish and English).

Photographs of Fotografiska are © Fotografiska
Photograph of Alfred Hitchcock, Los Angeles, 1973 © Albert Watson

Visit John Hudson’s website

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