Sune Jonsson: Nine reflections /5

… The verbal accompaniment must create new relationships and angles of approach to the pictorial material (even laconic): … Småbrukaren och kyrkogårdsarbetaren Hjalmar Nyberg, Nyåker, gräver grav för avlidne banmästaren Henrik Carlsson (Sune Jonsson)

NINE REFLECTIONS CONCERNING 1/125th

By Sune Jonsson (1978)

The consummate photo-documentation requires verbal accompaniment. This must have a clear documentary conception and ideally possess formal competence as well. There are, for example, plenty of photographs documenting log driving. The most meritorious is Stig T. Karlsson‘s 1957 depiction from The Little Lule River. Lacking, however,is documentary material that, from the standpoint of primary worker experience, verbalizes the content of log driving. For that reason, it is regrettable, when Stig T. Karlsson’s pictures are published in book form, that documentary consistency is sacrificed, and instead, Stig Sjödin is asked to write an accompanying text that flaunts a poetic empathy with the work depicted, that is surely more literary hypothesis than adequate expression of the log driver’s own experience of his toil.

One can, thus, strive for a double-jointed documentation of higher artistic dignity than the conventional in which text is degraded to the status of picture description or where picture is used as an illustration for text. The verbal accompaniment must create new relationships and angles of approach to the pictorial material. Separately, text and picture each represent different documentary spheres of the same material, fruitful reflections of the topic from differing points of departure: a sort of picture/text counterpoint that results in polyphony and at the same time creates formal tension and multiplicity, gives relief to the material, deepens the content and authenticity of the documentation. In Jacques Henri Lartique’s Diary of a Century (1970), this occurs logically via extremely personal and illuminating diary extracts that are etched in with the same light of feeling as the photographs, a verbalized experience that has come into being at the same point of intersection between time and space as the pictures. (To be continued on Filmkommentaren with four more reflections…)

http://goldendaysfestival.dk/event/når-asfalten-gynger (Den nuværende udstilling på Hovedbiblioteket i København, sidste dag 24. september 2016)

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/3598/ (Tue Steen Müller om den tidligere udstilling)

https://randersbiografien.wordpress.com/museum-samling/ (Allan Berg Nielsen om Sune Jonsson)

FOTOS

Sune Jonsson: Småbrukaren och kyrkogårdsarbetaren Hjalmar Nyberg, Nyåker, gräver grav för avlidne banmästaren Henrik Carlsson.

Bogens forside, Jacques Henri Lartigue: Diary of a Centary, 1970.