Sune Jonsson: Nine reflections /7
… Knowledge also affords artistic freedom. Experienced and versed, the author can move within his subject matter. His depiction of reality then becomes “macro realistic” – that is, a concrete expression of an inner reality.
NINE REFLECTIONS CONCERNING 1/125th
By Sune Jonsson (1978)
7
Ivar Lo-Johansson has asserted the authenticity of the self-experienced as a literary life-form and method. It is not enough for the author to have subjects: the subjects must also be part of his own self. Perhaps in this distinction we can also discern the essential difference between the author and the poet.
Knowledge also affords artistic freedom. Experienced and versed, the author can move within his subject matter. His depiction of reality then becomes “macro realistic” – that is, a concrete expression of an inner reality. The opposite method is observation from without – a “microrealism” without a deeper personal sounding board.
In the “social photo-picture books”, Ivar Lo-Johansson was the photographers’ client. This proved to entail a methodological conflict. “They constantly had to pass up the artistically attractive subjects they would have preferred taking and instead stick to subjects that, to them, seemed unartistic.” The client’s total experience of the subject matter arrayed against the outsider-photographer’s comparatively superficial experience. Ivar Lo Johansson tells of something that happened during his collaboration with Gunnar Lundh that well illustrates the importance of the assignment situation. On page 68 of Statarna i bild (Tenant farmers in Pictures) , there is a photograph of a chest of drawers and a simple bookshelf of meagre content. The photographer walked past the bookshelf three times without “noticing” it – that is, without perceiving it as testifying to a salient reality in the tenant-farmer environment. To Ivar Lo-Johansson, however, it represented – in a tangible and painful manner – the cultural lag of the farmworker class, something that in his program essays, polemical pamphlets, indeed in all his writings, he had described as the dilemma of the entire class: poverty and physical exhaustion as the gravediggers of the soul and of any longing for beauty. Do we understand Ivar Lo-Johansson correctly when we presume that Lundh and Jarlas – at least in the initial phase of the project were prisoners of the 1/125th convention: that they “as modern photographers wanted ‘action’ in their pictures, even where the people they were photographing sat paralyzed and where the paralysis itself should have been allowed to speak”? One is spontaneously reminded of Lo-Johansson ‘s words that true form “should be the subject matter’s form”. (To be continued on Filmkommentaren with three two more reflections…)
FOTO
Sune Jonsson: Sune Jonsson: Set Ramstedt, født 1885. Golisen, Västra Nästansjö, Vilhemina. August 1961. Efter et kringflackade, olycksdrabbat liv, var Set Ramstedt sedan 1930 innehavare av ett skogshemman. Han Bodde ensam i en enkel stuga. Sune Jonsson skriver i billedteksten i sin bog Album – fotografier fem decennier, 2000, hvorfra billedet er hentet: ”Han satt vid sin spis lila luttrad som en gång Oidipus vid källan, men ännu med liv i blicken. Han stekte kallpotatis i fläskflott. Sedan spelade han munspel.”
https://randersbiografien.wordpress.com/museum-samling/ (Om Sune Jonsson)
