That Scandi feeling… we’re still freaks of nature!
ESSAY — Nordic photography is still far from urbanised, writes author and creative director Claes Britton, founder of the legendary magazine Stockholm New.
WORDS: CLAES BRITTON, PHOTO: MARTINA HOOGLAND IVANOW
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A nude teen blonde girl (and very occasionally a lad) with natural, no make-up complexion, a piece of rock, a patch of blue sky, perhaps a spruce branch — those and a few more simple elements quickly became a widely-recognised trademark in the global fashion world when we launched our magazine Stockholm New back in those distant nineties. How sweet and sinless they appear today. Hell, some of those pics may have had us arrested in these less innocent contemporary times.
It was called the “Scandi-feeling” — a quality familiar to all photographers, stylists, agencies and others with whom we collaborated around the world in those days. Possibly, it still is.
So, what were they then, more precisely, these distinguishing features that defined this Scandi-feeling? You see it immediately in the selection of images sent to me representing the exhibition Nordic Spring. One word: nature. Nature is, and always has been, what sets us apart from the cosmopolitan societies and ancient cultures of the Euro-Asian continent, of which we’re not really a part.
In those continental civilizations, folks have gathered in cities for thousands of years, elaborating intricate, complex, sophisticated patterns of cosmopolitan society, traditions of socialising, business culture, corruption, gastronomy, art, you name it — even photography, why not?
“Lacking urbanity, we had all those forests, trees, lakes, rocks, skerries, birds, flowers, fish, insects, expanses of glimmering, flashing Baltic waters… and how sweet they were… so much more precious than any cosmopolitan temptations, no matter how attractive, expensive, refined, complex, bustling and dynamic.”
Up here, matters are more primitive. We haven’t been populating anything deserving of the term, cities, much less cosmopolitan metropolises, for even a century yet. Until recently, most Swedes, Norwegians, Finns, and Danes were basically farmers and woodsmen — simple brutes, eating salted herring and potatoes, felling pines and harvesting what prosaic crop of beets and grain that our meagre soils could muster.
Then came the industrial revolution, when Sweden was ultra-rapidly transformed, over the course of a few miraculous decades, from one of Europe’s poorest, most backward farm countries, into the world’s most advanced welfare nation, economically, technologically, humanistically, and in pretty much every other sense. Hell yeah!
As a visitor, don’t be fooled by the slickly contemporary, high-tech appearance of Stockholm, which nowadays actually deserves to be called a metropolis, a tiny one, but still. The cosmopolitan veneer is thin. Underneath lies the peasant — and underneath him that good ol’ ravin’, stompin’ Viking, and under him, a caveman. The Stockholm of today is an utterly gentrified hipster town but the overwhelming majority of that bearded, tattooed, duck-faced tribe are migrated from rural shitvilles and farmlands, and, as the old saying goes, in travesty — you can take the boy out of the farm but you can never ever take the farm out of the boy.
Never mind that shit. Our rural roots are obvious, not least in our arts. Take literature, for example. Our bookish history contains few urban writers. Pretty much all of our greats have been nature lyricists, one way or the other. Strangely, this bucolic ancestry is still painfully vibrant in our present times, however digital and urbanised these may appear. I don’t know about the other Nordic countries — and, frankly, I don’t particularly care — but contemporary Swedish prose and poetry, not that I follow it, seems to rarely go down in urban contexts but much more frequently in all those manure saturated backwoods.
This goes especially for our horrible contemporary literary export – Nordic Noir — that sluice of “suspense novels” that has been flooding the market ever since the incomprehensible success of Stieg Larsson’s Girl with the Spider Tattoo trilogy, or whatever the hell it’s called. These “novels” rarely occur in urban settings but rather far out in those hinterlands, where some maniac ritual serial killer is running amok, slicing and displaying his victims among the pines, rauks (a Gotlandic stone formation) and shit-stinking pastures, pursued by some melancholic, brooding, divorced, boozy lieutenant hot on the trail, with a passion for classical music and a problematic relationship with his teenage daughter… and the village’s golden days are long gone, the factory foreclosed, the town hall, where he once went dancing, too… All that remains is the sad hot dog stand on the outskirts of the outbacks where he consumes his unhealthy supper… even the gas station may be closing down soon enough… you know the style.
The same goes for visual arts. Most of our great artists were idolisers of nature, praising, with brushes and palettes, the magic of the forest, the waters, the blossom of spring and poetry of pristine Nordic winter.
Why fight this? With our magazine Stockholm New, we embraced our pastoral heritage in fashion stories and other photographic features. The reasons were natural. We simply don’t have the cosmopolitan scenes and backdrops of fashion cities such as Paris, London, or New York, nor much of the sophisticated haute bourgeoisie abundance in which fashion is traditionally staged. Hell no! Even in Stockholm, our sole real city, truly metropolitan environments are few. We had to go to Paris or New York for that crap. Perhaps it’s not surprising, therefore, that even VOGUE Scandinavia, when finally launched last fall, some thirty years later, had a distinct Viking/lumberjack air to it, brimming with advice on how to fashion garments from old folkloristic carpets, travel stories from Svalbard, recipes for cooking Icelandic blood sausage, reindeer balls and herring heads, huge northern workhorses and models running wild wielding axes bedecked in goatskins — same same, but different, and including the Samí, our ol’ native Scandinavians.
Lacking urbanity, we had all those forests, trees, lakes, rocks, skerries, birds, flowers, fish, insects, expanses of glimmering, flashing Baltic waters… and how sweet they were… so much more precious than any cosmopolitan temptations, no matter how attractive, expensive, refined, complex, bustling and dynamic. Times are late these days here on Earth, our dear old troubled planet, this becomes more blatant each day to every reasonably receptive human being. Lunatic fascist and religious extremists as well as our regular greed-head egomaniacs are of course demurred from that group of Homo sapiens, as they never fully evolved from the Neanderthal stage.
They can keep their cosmopolitan finery and all its allures, as long as we’re not deprived of these dire luxuries of fresh air, clean waters, deep woods, wild animals and pristine greenery. In much of this world, all this has long been raped, brutalised and butchered by “civilization,” urbanisation, growth, and “development.” Humanity is terrorising nature with ever increasing vigour, in the name of greed, expansion, progress, prosperity — all these masculine virtues. No wonder nature has been muscled to its knees by man, ready for the final slaughter, that suicidal coup de grace, not of the planet, but for humanity itself.
Our global population now amounts to twice the number as when I myself was born, a pathetic fifty-nine years ago. Think about that. A population that took millions of years to amass more than doubled over half a century. As if this wasn’t enough, each and every Homo sapien motherf---er here in the West, and mostly all around the world, demands so much more of life — not spiritually but materialistically. Hell, cars, houses, and everything else are twice or three times the size compared to when I was a boy. The subhuman greed-head missing link population, a predominantly male species, don’t settle for that. They consume at least ten times the resources as back in those days. How in the name of the fu---ng Lord do you expect our planet to handle this extreme pressure, eh? Of course it can’t. Tellus Mater, the ancient Roman earth mother goddess, needs to rid herself of the pandemic of the human race before it can start to recover. And it will, no doubt whatsoever about that.
Up here in the distant north, from where the rotten herring infested Vikings once came roaring, we’re doing our utmost to gang rape and massacre nature. However, we northerners are too few, our lands too vast, to do the job as swiftly as in continental Europe and elsewhere. While urban populations in proper monster megalopolises have lost contact with wilderness, living their lives hemmed in by asphalt, concrete, steel and glass, steeped in pollution, at best escaping now and then to controlled, disciplined patches of parkland, we Northerners still possess the rare privilege of constant access to real, wild nature. Even in Stockholm, this diminutive metropolis, wilderness is never more than half an hour away, still available even right in the city centre, at least for now. Here, nature remains greater than man, though we’re struggling successfully to bend it to our will. Respect and reverence for our great, rewarding, unforgiving northern wilderness, which provided for our remarkable prosperity, has formed our subpolar soul. In a, thank God, highly secularised society, love and worship of nature has long been the closest we come to a national religion, at least until recently.
“We found that there was a longing out there for this innocent purity, which appeared to represent something of a longing back home to some faraway memory, a faint trace of something that once was, engraved deep in the genes, for the people of the more complex, congested cosmopolitan societies around the globe.”
But hell, I’m rambling here! Sorry about that! I must get a grip of myself, before maniac greed-head gangster Putin nukes us all back to the Stone Age. The topic was photography, the Scandi-feeling, so let’s get down to business and conclude. For us, back in the nineties and around the Millennium, the Scandi-feeling became our brand, our raison d’etre. The proof of its power was omnipresent. Mikael Jansson was its master but in earnest, we must admit that its higher guru was no photographer but a cinematographer, Sven Nykvist.
In any case, global demand for this purer, simpler idiom was, and perhaps still is, robust. We found that there was a longing out there for this innocent purity, which appeared to represent something of a longing back home to some faraway memory, a faint trace of something that once was, engraved deep in the genes, for the people of the more complex, congested cosmopolitan societies around the globe.
What a treat it was when, in 2013, eleven years after our departure with Stockholm New, we returned for an encore in the form of our coffee table book and exhibition in the Thielska Galleriet museum in Royal Djurgården Park. A dream came true when I personally, together with my man Andreas Brändström, the museum director at the time, acquired the surreal concession to combine and juxtapose our images, in the form of monumental prints by photographers Mikael Jansson, Julia Hetta, Frederik Lieberath, Sølve Sundsbø, Gösta Reiland, and others, some of whom are represented here, with the masterpiece paintings in the museum collection, by the likes of Edvard Munch, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Anders Zorn, Bruno Liljefors, Eugène Jansson, Ernst Josephson, Nils Kreuger, Richard Bergh, Gustav Fjaestad, and others, those high priests of visual natural lyricism from the past turn of the century, an all-male group, unfortunately. What an orgy of adoration for nature it was, a great final bow to a past era, of innocence and purity lost. The title of the exhibition? Stockholm New — national romanticism from double turn of the centuries: contemporary fashion photography meets classic masterpiece painting.
I think it’s nice to see that, judging from the selection of images in the Nordic Spring exhibition, Nordic photography still looks far from urbanised, ever dwelling out there in the sticks. We seem to remain freaks of nature. Personally, I wish it could stay that way for the rest of my days.
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