What we know about the world, we know from the media as Niklas Luhmann once explained. And above all, photography has decisively shaped our image of the world over the last 100 years. Once, there were talented cameramen such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa telling amazing stories with their black-and-white snapshots. Today, around 95 million new photos are uploaded to Instagram every single day, forming a giant mosaic of digitally connected humanity. And yet, the democratisation of the media and triumphal march of smartphone photographers has not supplanted artistic photography. Quite the contrary – at auction, renowned photographers including Andreas Gursky, Richard Prince, and Jeff Wall continue to set record prices and in major museums and art fairs such as Art Basel, photography naturally sits alongside painting and sculpture.
Today, one of the most interesting addresses for artistic photography can be found in Stockholm. Fotografiska is a museum in which you can admire the works of the renowned photographers of our time in ever-changing exhibitions – from David LaChapelle and Annie Leibovitz to Helmut Newton and Sally Mann. At the same time, Fotografiska is also so much more: with an urban meeting space, academy, conference centre, and sophisticated restaurant, the centre is one of Scandinavia’s cultural hotspots. In experiencing the aesthetically demanding, expertly curated exhibitions of the most famous photographer’s work in addition to that from young and talented up-and-comers, visitors can learn, understand, and exchange ideas about the world, their lives, and their society.
Inspired by the centre’s success in their homeland, founders Jan and Per Broman have decided to globalise Fotografiska. In the fashionable London district of Whitechapel, a new branch will open in the autumn of 2019 encompassing a museum, café, sustainable gourmet restaurant, shop, and various forums. If you’d like to get an impression of the range of photography that will be exhibited at Fotografiska’s new London and New York branches, then we highly recommend the magnificent book The Eye, published by TeNeues. It features 250 images by 80 exceptional photographers including Anton Corbijn, Bryan Adams, and Jimmy Nelson, all of whose work was shown at Fotografiska Stockholm in its first eight years.
Photos: Fotografiska
