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  • Oil Rich

    In Oil Rich N & N the Nigerian photographer George Osodi compares the oil industries in Nigeria and Norway. He is primarily concerned with everyday life near the sites of oil production.

    His documentation of the oil-rich delta in southern Nigeria has resulted in an extensive work exploring the region’s extreme conditions, both social and environmental, to which the international press has paid little attention. In the delta area where the oil is exploited, there is great unrest and hostility, and few enjoy any benefits from the proceeds of “the black gold”. The growing hostility to the oil industry and Government employees has paved the way for an armed militia, who will not flinch from defending their rights with violence.

    There are great differences between daily life in Norway and Nigeria. Norway has been an oil-producing country for forty years. Oil and gas have become the country’s main export commodity and the oil fund waxes year on year. The photos from Norway were taken during a stay in Oslo, Lofoten and in the oil capital of Stavanger in 2008.

    George Osodi is self-taught in photography and works as a freelancer based in London and Lagos. His photographs are difficult to categorize. They are a blend of photo journalism, photo essay and activism. Osodi has worked for national and international media; for example, his photographs have been published in The New York Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek, The Guardian, The Telegraph, USA Today, The International Herald Tribune and Der Spiegel.

    Production: The Norwegian National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design

    Curator: Stina Høgkvist, the National Museum

    Touring and dissemination in Northern Norway: SKINN

    This exhibition is part of the project for schools Den Kulturelle Skolesekken (The Cultural Satchel) in Nordland, Troms and Finnmark.

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  • Veiled Rebellion – Women in Afghanistan

    Lynsey Addario made her first trip to Afghanistan in May of 2000 to document the lives of women living under the oppression of the Taliban. She returned to Afghanistan two more times before the fall of the Taliban in November 2001.

    In those days, women were virtually invisible, and the streets were silent: music and entertainment was banned under Sharia law, electricity was scarce, and contact with the outside world was almost non-existent. The only women on the streets were beggars—usually widows or wives of disabled men, begging for money to support their families.  Most educated women in the cities spent their days squirreled away behind closed doors in family compounds, caring for their children, while rural women continued to work in the fields.

    On many Fridays, the Taliban performed public executions at the sports stadium—the same stadium in which today, young men and women train in boxing, karate, and soccer, and now hosts political and social gatherings for men and women, alike.

    Over the last eleven years, Addario has returned to Afghanistan almost every year to photograph the development of life across the country, and the ongoing war between NATO troops and Taliban sympathizers, and how the war has affected life for civilians and foreign troops. Addario has documented the toll of the war on both sides, spending months on numerous embeds with American troops from the Korengal Valley in the East, to Helmand province in the South, while making frequent trips to the country to spend time with civilians. Throughout, she has trained a close eye through her lens on women’s lives in all arenas of Afghan society: culture, politics, education, employment, and domestic life.

    In 2009, National Geographic magazine commissioned Addario to photograph a comprehensive essay depicting the many facets of women’s lives in Afghanistan: Veiled Rebellion. Because of cultural and societal taboos, it is extremely difficult to photograph women in the conservative country—most women need permission from a male relative to be photographed. This body of work is the product of this assignment.

    The exhibition is produced by The Nobel Peace Centre in Oslo

    More images

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  • White Sea Black Sea

    Over a period of six years Jens Olof Lasthein has travelled along the EU’s eastern border from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the South photographing everyday life. The people here exist between two worlds, in transit between two phases, where nothing is decided and the aim is rather uncertain. They haven’t quite left the past, but nor have they fully entered the future.

    Since the fall of the Iron Curtain almost 20 years ago, the countries of the former eastern bloc have experienced a major transition – and still are. During this period, a new demarcation line has developed, identical to the EU’s eastern border.

    The exhibition is a result of Jens Olof Lasthein’s extensive project undertaken in the period 2001 – 2007. His photographs show landscapes and people from Transylvania, Russia, Moldovia, Ukraine and Belorussia – in the border region between east and west in Europe.

    White Sea Black Sea is about borders: an outer, physical border and an inner, invisible one that divides people. The everyday world forms our inner border, between that which we recognise and that which we don’t understand. Has the world really becoming smaller, as we keep reminding ourselves, or are the borders for what we see as part of ourselves continuing in tighter circles?

    Lasthein’s visual journey through the borderland between east and west in Europe is in all its simplicity an attempt to soften up borders – the photographer’s and perhaps also those of others.

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  • The People of the Mountains and the Sea

    Sonja Siltala has been taking pictures of Kvens, or descendants of Finnish immigrants to ”Ruija” (North Norway), in Finnmark and Troms since 2001. Through her portraits, the photographer attempts to highlight the Kven culture through individuals.

    This has been a challenging, slowly progressing, occasionally icy – but, above all, interesting – adventure among people between the mountains and the sea ….

    Sonja Siltala

    People we meet in the exhibition all reside in central Kven areas and have Kven as their mother tongue. Many earn their living in traditional occupations.

    Sonja Siltala has used her personal network, along with a direct approach, to establish contact with Kvens. According to the photographer, these approaches have been greeted with friendliness and hospitality.

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  • Dog Dogs

    Photos of dogs? Well, yes – but through Elliott Erwitt’s lens these images document so much more than just banal motifs. He captures the moment, the feeling, the humor which can be encapsulated by photography’s immediate snapshot of reality. In Erwitt’s images, one can see the human reflexes as an underlying tone in the photos.

    The dog pictures work on two levels. Dogs are simply funny when you catch them in certain situations, so some people like my pictures just because they like dogs. But dogs have human qualities, and I think my pictures have an anthropomorphic appeal. Essentially, they have nothing to do with dogs… I mean, I hope what they’re about is the human condition. But people can take them as they like.

    Elliott Erwitt

    Elliott Erwitt was born in France to Russian parents in 1928: he was then partly raised in Italy and has since resided in a number of countries. Today he lives mainly in New York. He became a member of the prestigious agency Magnum Photos in 1953, and has served as its president for three terms since 1968. Erwitt worked as a freelance photographer for Collier ‘s, Look, Life, Holiday and other magazines in the golden age of photojournalism.

    Elliott Erwitt continues to be a prominent figure in documentary photography; at eighty years of age, he is still an active participant and trendsetter who manages to surprise and freeze the magic of the moment in the photograph – though not always from the angle you usually see. Erwitt believes good photos only come from the viewer’s interpretation and experiencing of the images. He is a playful photographer and his photos often draw a chuckle.

    Although he says he never tries to be funny, he appreciates his photos may produce this effect. Many images of dogs and their owners have been produced over the years, and he has since published the best in a number of books and displayed them in an exhibition. Dog Dogs consists of 68 black-and-white photographs taken from 1946 to 2004.

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  • Eight Seasons

    The exhibition is part of a series of common interest stories that appeared in the newspaper Västerbottens-Kuriren in 2008, in which photographer Torbjörn Jakobsson and journalist Bertil Wallin followed the Rehnfjells, a young family of reindeer herders during the autumn “sarv” slaughter, the winter migrations and the summer calf branding over a one-year period:

    A reindeer herding year can be divided into eight seasons; they are governed by the rhythms of nature, the herds’ needs, and grazing conditions. Photographer Torbjörn Jakobsson takes us with him as we follow the Sami herders’ movements in Västerbotten, north of Umeå. Our first encounter with Sophia, Johan and their children Niila and Pontus takes place in late summer during calf branding season high up in the hills, a mere stone’s throw from the Norwegian border. And then we are invited into a world that most of us know little or nothing about.

    Through Jakobsson’s pictures, we become intimately acquainted with the Rehnfjell family and with what is so special about their nomadic lifestyle. The story of Sophia and Johan Rehnfjell and their children is a story of hard work, dedicated traditions and a tight-knit sense of community. But it is also about fresh challenges, where climate change, in particular, threatens the very basis of their existence. The conditions for the survival of Samis as reindeer herders have changed, Sophia claims, so she has set her sights on tourism.

    “Eight Seasons” is Perspektivet Museum’s contribution during Sami Week 2011. It was produced by Västerbotten’s Museum in Umeå, in collaboration with Västerbottens-Kuriren.

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  • Masterpieces of Italian Photography

    The careers of Gianni Berengo Gardin and Piergiorgio Branzi started in the 1950s and both photographers were influenced by their pioneering forerunners within the documentary genre. In 1994 they were represented as two of the twentieth century’s great masters in the exhibition “The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943 – 1968” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

    Their many prizes, awards, exhibitions and published books testify to their enormous popularity and the wide regard in which they are held. This is the first time their work has been displayed in Scandinavia.

    In the 1960s, Gianni Berengo Gardin settled in Milan where he was soon given photographic assignments by various industrial concerns. He also completed projects for Touring Club Italiano, Instituto Geografico De Agostini and the prominent architect Renzo Piano, and not least the magazine Il Mondo, for which he worked for many years.

    Berengo Gardin’s ambitious project has involved describing the social, political and cultural aspects of life in post-war Italy, including reports on psychiatric institutes, the 1968 movement and gypsies. People at work, the lives and conditions of ordinary folk and landscapes are his key motifs in his photographs. All of this, always with deep respect, and considering the eye, heart and mind equally important.

    Piergiorgio Branzi studied classical culture and history and is known for his experimental style and elegant compositions, finely balancing a tranquil lyricism with formal realism. Through a broad array of motifs featuring people and environments in both urban and provincial settings, he conveys his keen interest in social and political conditions in post-war Italy.

    Piergiorgio Branzi is also known as a talented writer, thanks not least to his popular travel diaries from southern Italy, Spain and India between 1953 and 1960. He later worked as a journalist for the RAI television company which dispatched him to Moscow as the first western reporter in the Soviet Union.

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  • Lovely Beings

    The old main building from Kvitnes in Nord Troms creates a suitable frame around the exhibition about the young, single daughters at the trading centres in North Norway in the 19th century. There are few pictures of these women, and little has been written about them in the history books.

    On the other hand, they are vividly described in fiction and travel descriptions from the period. Visitors from the south, mostly men, took notice of the merchants’ daughters’ gracious charms, their fine manners and modern clothes and hairstyles, which largely followed the trends in Europe. Many foreigners were amazed to find such refinement so far north!

    At the heart of the exhibition is a reconstructed young girl’s room from the 19th century, richly furnished with traditional needlework done by hard-working women’s hands. Quotations by Hamsun, visitors from abroad and others are accompanied by objects used by the young ladies.

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  • The Tassled Parlour

    At Kvitnes manor, the museum has reconstructed a parlour as it may have appeared at a Northern Norwegian trading place towards the end of the nineteenth century.

    Known in Norwegian as the klunk style (from the German klunk, meaning tassel), it is a form of Scandinavian Victoriana. It features solid, heavily upholstered furniture richly adorned with fringing and tassels, large green plants and artfully draped curtains. The paintings and prints in lavish frames, candelabra, numerous portraiture photos, decorative figures and exotic souvenirs were supposed to help create a homely ambience – the very antithesis of minimalism!

    This style is one of many within historicism which influenced European architecture and interior design from about 1850 to 1900. As the name suggests, inspiration was drawn from various historical stylistic periods, such as Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo, but also from the Orient and Japan. Later generations came to regard this style as insipid and florid, and used derogatory terms to characterize it such as “the period of terror” and “stylistic mismatch.”

    Historicism was popular with the bourgeoisie, many of whom drew their ideals of good taste and breeding from the old European aristocracy. The older styles were associated with wealth and prestige. At the same time the transition from craftsmanship to mechanized mass production made it easier for ordinary citizens to have copied costly furnishings and other items. Even relatively poor middle-class families with many children and little space prioritized having a lovely parlour to be used only for special occasions.

    Thanks to lively coastal trade, the North Norwegian trading posts came into contact with and were very receptive to impulses from afar. European fashions and social etiquette spread rapidly along the coast, reaching the houses of local magnates. In the parlour at the trading post, local merchants might savour cigars and fine European wines from cut-glass drinking vessels with their trading partners, while the son or daughter of the house might entertain guests at the piano with renditions of Chopin, Grieg, Liszt and other popular composers of the day.

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  • In Cod We Trust

    People in Northern Norway have always had to rely on the life in the sea, where cod spread the greatest expectations and joy along the coast. The migration of the cod created a kind of fever in the people who lived on the coast, and had great influence on their entire lifestyle.

    Towards the end of the 19th century, the cod fisheries in Lofoten had developed into the largest workplace in Northern Norway, with more than 30,000 “employees”. The seasonal fisheries emptied homes and villages of ablebodied men and left the women behind with a heavy burden of responsibility. The women baked, knit, sewed and made certain that the men did not lack for anything during the long Lofoten Fishery.

    The exhibition is not only about the cod fishery and the preparations for it, but also about the international background for this adventure, the trade with stockfish and clipfish as culinary highlights in the food traditions of foreign lands. It is not only about history, but also about a very active industry that offers exciting meetings between what is genuinely North Norwegian and impulses from virtually the entire world.

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