Exhibition. Galleri CFF
An exhibition about the Bildaktivisterna by Cecilia Grönberg & Jonas (J) Magnusson
Tommy Tommie, Björn Myrman och Bengt O Nordin
20220820 - 20220925
In the summer of 1968, the group Bildaktivisterna was formed by photographers Tommy Tommie, Björn Myrman, and Bengt O Nordin. However, Bildaktivisterna would take shape as an open association that is not purely media-specific, but actively integrates and uses a range of different media, which are brought together in new combinations and constellations. Text and image montages create powerful critical messages, actions in images.
For Bildaktivisterna, which at most has some seventy members in Stockholm and local groups in Landskrona, Gävle, and Gothenburg, knowledge of what is being documented and the use of images is in focus. They insist on taking responsibility for all stages of an information system: not only the production of photographs, but also the distribution, presentation, and use of them in contexts that the group can stand behind. Kurt Bergengren writes at the time that Bildaktivisterna constitutes “springboards for a completely new age,” while the magazine Foto believes that they have invented “a new medium” – a more open, more operational, and less professionally specialized constellation of different media and practices. “We wanted to be our own clients and have control over the entire process. We wanted what we did to have a function and be part of something that we ourselves were a part of, a certain social context. In that way, we were perhaps innovators” (Tommy Tommie).
Bildaktivisterna’s work in Stockholm and other places in the late 1960s and early 1970s is as radical as it is innovative. Nevertheless, this socialist photography has remained remarkably under-historicized.
Centrum för fotografi exhibits photographs, slideshows, posters, printed matter, and films from Bildaktivisterna’s production. The exhibition is made by Cecilia Grönberg and Jonas (J) Magnusson, who in the autumn of 2022 will publish the book Bildaktivisterna (actions in images in the Swedish 1960s and 1970s) at OEI editör (1020 pages).
