Interview with Klara Källström

During our meetings, we have talked some about the genre classifications in photography.  It still seems relatively easy to revolt against conventions in the world of photography. Why is that?

The photograph has for a long time had a position as undisputed truth bearer, which in some way is still valid. Since the postmodernism, and in some cases even earlier, has this position been questioned.  Photography is a young form of expression. The color photograph advanced into the history, on a broad front, only fifty years ago.  Above all photography is a media consisting of many different genres, and the discursive analysis has challenged the question about what may be called what, and therefore many truths have been turned upside down.  In a way, we are still there, in the being of formulation. But I don’t longer believe there is a meaning to reject everything that has something to do with the history of the medium and refers to that which is essential photographic. Instead, we now find ourselves in a place where we can recognize and make use of the medium’s various meanings and add new elements to expand and understand it, instead of neglect or disprove its validity. Due to photography’s young age, it has been important to revolt against its conventions in the second half of the 1900’s, exactly the same way that painting has evolved, the difference is maybe that the latter medium has had more time progress.

Do you think these differences and contradictions in photography will consist?

I believe that there always will be rebellion in every media. Photography’s rapid technological development contributes to the many and frequent revolts.  However, I do not think our perception of the photograph has changed as fast as the physical aspects. The human psyche and our understanding of how photography works and what limitations it might have, is different from how the technology works. On an intellectual level, we constantly have to catch up with the media. I think we on a mental plane have a special understanding of photography and we attribute the medium qualities based on this understanding. However, this approach is of course also changing.  If you in a few years from now asks a person, who has grown up in a more seamless environment and has grown accustomed to 3d animated images and their transparency , about an image that is not necessarily taken from the physical reality, I think you would get a different answer.

You run B-B-B-Books with designers 1:2:3 and photographer Thobias Fäldt. Thobias and you often collaborate and together you created the project and publication Wikiland, which was awarded at Scanpix Big Photo Award. In this you play with news journalistic strategies, but you choose to omit the sensations and the portraits of Julian Assange are absent. Why did you decide to design the project this way? Is it that important to question the image of photography’s truth-bearing relevance?

It is not important to question its truth-bearing relevance, but it’s essential to consider how photography of this kind works and what it produces. When we partake in things of relatively sensational dimensions, something happens with the viewer.  It’s the interest in this expectation that is central to the project. Not whether the pictures are true or not, it is a discourse that I think we can leave from now on.  What the images are producing and how we thereby filter things that are presented to us, this I think is interesting. Nor do I believe the physical experience is only an outcome of the interaction between the viewer and the story, but also a result of the shape you view the images through.  In this case, for example, it was important to use a newspaper format which has its own agency and thereby creates conscious or unconscious understanding of the story. Everything acts on different planes and the human intellect alone is not always essential for the understanding.

Tell us a bit about “Russian Bang” that is currently exhibited at Nextart Gallery.

Russian Bang is a project where the trees in the devastated area around Eriksdal are ascribed the role as eyewitnesses.  I assume that the trees witnessed the event in 1944, when Russian planes bombed Södermalm in Stockholm.  I use the usual method; conversation with survivors of the time, which in my case consists of 11 trees. On them and the black backgrounds, I’m projecting the story, which in my case consists of a text in verse form and one archive picture of the site were the bombs once fell down.

In what way does this project differ from your other works?

It does not differ much from Wikiland, I might say. Russian Bang is about “washing the vision”, to put the viewers in a position where they start looking for what a title, an archive, a poem and a descriptive text refers to. The pictures are affected by the context: we interpret things in the photographs that really just depict seemingly ordinary trees. I have tried to portray the trees in a human-like manner, to assist the viewer in a direction from which I want them to look at my pictures. In Wikiland, our direction was the opposite: the viewer was supposed to have a preunderstanding of the subject, and that this would create the stories. But the connection between these projects is their allusion on preunderstanding or incomprehension. That’s basically the same starting point I think.