Henrik Saxgren, Northern Exposures
Hasse Persson
This unique documentary project by the famous Danish photographer Henrik Saxgren on Northern European immigration is open at Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg, Sweden. The opening of "War & Love" will coincide with the onset of Sweden’s Multi-cultural Year 2006. The exhibition will be on tour throughout Scandinavia for the next two years.
As the exhibition’s title indicates, war and love are two important reasons for people to look for a better life. First and foremost is that most immigrants are victims of war–the victims of internal conflict as well as war between countries. Love is the other strong reason for wanting to move to Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, and such faraway places as Greenland and Iceland. In his research project on immigration, Henrik Saxgren has been investigating and photographing immigrants in all these countries. Using medium size cameras, he spent four years on the road to complete this photographic documentary.
"War & Love" is probably the largest photographic project about the millions of people who have ruptured ties with their native lands in search of a better life since Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado´s documentation "Migration." Saxgren, however, starts where Salgado stops. Saxgren’s pictures portray the true immigrant.
In his work, Saxgren has identified around 110 different ethnic groups that have immigrated to the Northern Europe. Out of these groups, Saxgren randomly picked individuals, couples and families to photograph and interview in their homes and workplaces. Obviously posing, Saxgren´s immigrants look into the camera within their new environment–an environment that, in most cases, reveals their origin in a touching way. One is moved by the welcoming looks on their faces–a look as if to invite you, the onlooker, into their new homes. This is a gesture that, hopefully, will have a positive influence on the viewer, maybe aid Scandinavians with professed difficulties in making acquaintances with immigrants. Today, immigrants in big cities, like Stockholm, comprise some 25 percent of the population.
To illuminate the sometimes bleak life in the Scandinavian countries, Saxgren holds back the colors in his well-lit photographs of the new members of society. As a contrast, he works in vivid colors when showing large panorama views of different assembly camps, the place where immigrants often spend years waiting to find out whether or not they have a right to receive a residence permit.
Another obvious comparison to Saxgren´s project is, of course, the German photographer August Sander´s (1876-1964) monumental project portraying the German population between the First and the Second World War. In 1929, Sander published Faces of the Times (Anlitz der Zeit), a book of sixty portraits that has since become a classic. Sander assembled individuals from all walks of life–farmers, clergymen, painters, bureaucrats, gypsies, nuns, clerks and, lastly, the unemployed and mentally ill.
"From the very beginning I was most inspired by August Sander," Saxgren discloses. "I admired his toned down subjectivity and almost scientific seriousness, which makes it possible that I still today can find new information in his photographs. My concept from the very beginning was to have the same objectivity in the framing and lighting in my photographs that Sander and his German colleagues had in their spirit of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) in the 1920s," writes Saxgren in the afterword to his book.
It is fair to say that Saxgren´s new project about immigration will have an enormous impact on the way we look at these new Scandinavians; these new Scandinavians who, no doubt, will have a hard road to travel before being fully accepted and assimilated into the Scandinavian societies. Hopefully, reluctant Danes, Finns, Norweigians and Swedes–by looking at the photographs of these new groups and reading about them in the new book War & Love–will open up and welcome these new Scandinavians into their hearts and minds. If Saxgren´s photographs and texts will help to bridge the gap between "them" and "us", his project will be remembered for generations to come.
