The history of Fatamorgana's art
By Morten Bo
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I am sitting at an unpretentious, cosy restaurant in Stockholm's Gamla Stan opposite Christer Strömholm who has promised to be the patron of the photographic school I am starting in Copenhagen. That week I have been a guest lecturer at the Nordens fotoskole, just over the corner, and Christer has now collected me so that we can talk about my ongoing project. The table cloth is red-chequered, and the service is quick and professional. Christer orders a Margherita and some soda water. He is speaking fast and I understand just half of what he says, though I take the effort to lean across the table and try to distinguish the words from one another. I consider Christer Strömholm as the ultimate reason why Swedish photography, unlike Danish photography, is so well developed. He was the trend-setter who educated a generation of groundbreaking Swedish photographers; to me he is a myth in the history of photography, and he is sitting right opposite, diligently cutting his pizza, and he is conveying to me his views on photographic education.
The autumn the previous year I had initiated a course in photography at the Samsø Folkehøj../skole. The school was about to close for lack of students, and they had tried, by appointing me in order to create a photography department, to get new students to enrol. It happened. I had a poster that called the school a 'photography high school' printed, and new students streamed in, thus securing the school's existence. There had been only one problem: the headmaster never quite thought of his school as a 'photography school', and in four furious months I decided to create a school of my own.
The Danish Law on Public Recreation ordered municipalities to subsidise vocational training if there were more than twelve people sharing a common interest, so I chose, together with Mikael Opstrup, a colleague of mine at the Ragnarok photo agency, to found the school as a subsidised evening educational institution. A course could not last more than 160 hours, but by adding up four consecutive courses with the same participants we came up with a programme of four months, eight hours a day. There was no condition that the educational process should be taking place evenings only.
The students' organisation DE ORDBLÆNDE* that consisted of both students I had taught at Samsø and of others with an interest in photography helped paint and build a darkroom in a small flat I had found in the Inner City. The photographic equipment wholesaler Goecker had donated trays and enlargers, and Kodak had given us three worn-out tables. We had bought a second-hand refrigerator for dkr 100, and had found an old vacuum cleaner.
Christer first cuts a circle in the middle of his pizza, and then portions the outer layers in smaller pieces. The crispy crusts he eats his fingers, and the soft middle with a fork and a knife. I have never seen this before.
During lunch only Christer does the talking. I am trying to concentrate on what he says, but it is as if he is talking to his pizza. At one point towards the end of our lunch I raise the not-so-unimportant issue that at the school we cannot afford chairs. Then, for the first time, he looks me directly in the eye, and begins speaking loud and clear so that to avoid misunderstandings:
'Then they should be sitting on the floor!'
In the first course there were 42 applicants. DE ORDBLÆNDE * and myself chose 20, on the basis of the portfolios they had submitted. Amongst them was a Swede, a Norwegian, and a refugee from East Germany. Tina Tolstrup had produced some dull, to put it mildly, small-sized black-and-white pictures from a trip to Mexico, but she had been so active in the preparatory work for the school, and then she had the indisputable advantage of having been an educated bank accountant. With her in charge of the school's coffers, and with Vibeke Jørgensen, a former student at Samsø, to take care of the practical problems, the first course started on 1 September 1989.
17 of the 20 today work as photographers. After Fatamorgana they went on to study in Bergen (Norway), in Gothenburg (Sweden), at the Nordens fotoskole in Stockholm, at the ICP in New York, at the Danish School of Design, at the School of Journalism. Two of them are advertising photographers, two others work in film. Tina Tolstrup quickly emerged as a better photographer than an agile accountant. After four months of simultaneous book-keeping and studies in photography, she relayed the numbers to Laura Eriksen who had been a student in the first course but was now appointed as a day-to-day manager, and who in the course of the one-and-a-half years she spent at the school developed into an unusually competent photographer. At the Ragnarok, at that time, we needed to appoint someone in Klaus Holsting's place, and it was only natural to offer the job to Tina.
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Motivation would be the driving force of all activities at the school. Education would not implant finished skills and abilities, but would encourage every individual's self-motivation. My standpoint was that everyone had it all in them, it should just be brought out. By tempting, intriguing, challenging and coaxing I should do everything possible to bolster the students' desire to be creative. They should use me as a bouncing wall, as a mirror that did not always show what is expected of it, as a confidante or a controller, but I should never try to teach them something. The students should obtain their own experiences through their work with photography, also when
it concerned its technical aspects. Many students were angry at me when they asked a question about technique, and I quoted Christer Strömholm,
'Read the instructions!'
When Anders Koppel came to the school during the first course and was asked by a student how he composed a musical piece, he replied, 'First I set some rules about what the music should be like, tonality, rhythm, that kind of thing, then I find a theme or a melody, and the rest is just to put it together.'
It was not different with photography. I would teach the students how to set the rules, help them with their attitude, and just let them put it together. Concrete limits and hesitant experiments should be pursued. Frames and fantasy.
Documentary photography and free photographic art should thrive side by side. It was important for me that the students accepted all forms of art photography. In Denmark, in contrast to other countries, there was at that time an explicit borderline between documentary photography and photography as a free art. I had a dream that Danish documentary photographers, too, should
be able to work in art photography, and that art photographers in Denmark, too, should not become prostitutes in order to take pictures that had people in them. I felt photographers in both camps in fact belonged to the same family, but they didn't understand or respect each other. This should not happen at the school.
The guest lecturers should provide inspiration from all sectors of photography. In the span of a week the most authoritative professional photographers would teach in their field of speciality. With or without people in the pictures. With or without black margins. I would teach half-way through the week, the rest would be allocated to personalities from all shades of the photographic art. The school would be afloat in a sea of proposals, and the students would be given all possibilities in order to discover out their real selves.
With full deliberation I would break down all preconditioned notions about photography, and I would even run the risk of totally confusing the students by making them accept all photographic genres.
'The expensive school with the grand teachers,' they called it around town. I dreamt of total freedom within some stable borders. I would request the students to work, but wouldn't tell them what to do. I would demand engagement, but wouldn't decide what they should engage themselves in. I articulated a set of rules about rights and obligations. About responsibility.
Within the rules, everything should be possible. Bjørn Nørgaard once came to the school and talked to the students about the act of creation.
'To create a work of art or to create a school is basically the same thing,' he said. 'In both cases there should be a set of notions about what's allowed, the rest should be left to fantasy. '
I had set the framework, had worked out the rules, had made room for fantasy. I had found the tune, it was now time to just put things together.
In that first course there was a peculiar pioneering spirit. The students felt that it was their own school, many of them had helped in establishing it, they were proud, and they were happy to be at it. They were attending the first School of Photography in Denmark as, simply, there were no other institutions where the art of photography was taught eight hours a day.
And a night. At the beginning I had equipped the school's office as my private bedroom so that I wouldn't need to go home at 4 a. m. when I was tired of talking about photography or of standing with the students in the darkroom. There was always someone on the premises at night, either because they didn't have the time during the day, or because it just felt cosier when ordinary people had gone to bed. At night there was a special atmosphere of confidence, a kind of intensity. At night we were switched on, our arguments were clearer, and our pictures better.
But when the next morning I, in slippers and wearing a robe, wandered through the living room while the diligent held their meeting, on their scowling eyelids I could notice that their night-time enthusiasm had a darker side. Having lived at the school for the first 14 days, I moved home again, and since then have worked regular hours.
The municipality required us to fulfil certain legal demands.
On a special form we were supposed to tick the names of whoever was present on a given day, and we could anticipate spot checks. When we went to see an exhibition, I would pin a piece of paper on the door telling the unexpected controller where we were and when we were expected to return. The school was not supposed to provide education for a particular job, neither should the students be given professional credentials that could qualify them at the workplace better than those who had not attended the school. The municipal subsidy was conditional upon the students' interest in photography as a hobby. The Trade Union of Photographers had heard about the school and had contacted me to get confirmed that what we were doing could not be interpreted as unsolicited education but was just vocational training for youngsters in their spare time.
It was also problematic that we had selected as would-be students the best applicants. Evening schools were supposed to be for all, and no-one was better qualified than the others. But just as a course might be called 'Intermediary Level French',
I could require a certain level of competence as a condition to participate. And if there had been more applicants than we could accept in a given class, we should take into consideration their social situation as well. We did. An applicant should send us a portfolio of ten photographs in order to document his or her professional competence, and then we would select those considered to be socially best suitable.
At the obligatory management course I had to undergo, I learned that in Denmark laws were not made to have the citizens fall in line with them. Laws were made to reflect public practices. It is
not immoral or offensive to bend the directives, statutes, regulations and laws so that they best serve the new times. The legislation would just follow.
In its first years Fatamorgana was a shining example of a practice that was later turned into legislation with the Law of Public Education.
At that time there was a politically active photographers' group that called itself BACKLIGHT. They appeared every time there was a demonstration or a blockade or a sit-in strike, and they distributed their photographs to underground newspapers and socialist publications. Three of the group's four members took part in the school's first course in the autumn of 1989, and they left their distinct touch on it. Together with Tao Lytzen, Morten Nilsson, Christoffer Regild and Thomas Marott they made up the hard pith of reportage photographers. Women like Laura Eriksen, who made beautiful dream-like photographs of children running in flippant white dresses, could at times feel caught in the domineering whirlpool of hard documentary.
Henrik Saxgren was a guest lecturer in the week the Berlin Wall fell down. When the students came to school on Monday morning he confronted them with some guarded reproach because they were not in Berlin.
'It is the only proper place for photographers to be in,' he said, and so half the class, encouraged by the hard core of the reportage boys, took the train to Berlin that same night, and left Henrik Saxgren with the sensitive and the gentle who did not consider it their most important task to travel to Berlin where photographers from the whole world had closed in to illustrate the world's history. When the whiz-kids returned home with their bags full of exposed film, Henrik's week at the school was over. He had had a very unexciting time.
But it had not been boring in Berlin. Tao had taken the best picture: two pairing dogs in front
of the graffiti-covered wall. It was used as promotional picture for the exhibition the students organised on the wall of Assistens Cemetery facing Nørrebrogade, one of Copenhagen's main thoroughfares. 'Pictures from the Wall - on the Wall'.
The students' active marketing functioned, many newspapers wrote about the pictures, but no-one actually saw them. I know, because as the pictures were on show, I sat with a student-guard in my car at the opposite side of the road and kept an eye on the art.
As a balance to the documentary trend I had selected a project, 'Like a dream', where the students should photograph for three days at the Danish Aquarium, at Thorvaldsen's Museum, and in the Palm House at the Botanical Gardens, using a tripod for all their dream-pictures. Now the reportage boys felt jammed in, but they groped their way around and followed through as well as they could. But when, at the viewing later, we would come to Tao's photographic dream he couldn't hold himself any longer. He crumpled his photograph and hurled it onto the table,
'What a shit project!'
A few years later Tao was working with Henrik Saxgren in the 2 MAY photographers' group.
I had re-jinxed my ideas about how the course should proceed when the next one started. I gave up formulating assignments for all of us to go take pictures in the same place, least of all everybody using tripods. The selection of guest lecturers would be prioritised differently, and the dominance of documentary should be toned down.
I needed Per Bak Jensen.
Per Bak was educated at the Royal Academy of Art, his area of interest was plant details, enigmatic bushes and mummified animals at the Museum of Zoology. Significantly, there were no people in his pictures. One couldn't go further away from political reportage, and so he was a lecturer at the Art Academy.
I got Per Bak to teach for 14 days.
In the class there was an young mechanic who dreamed of becoming a photographer. He was a decent documentary photographer whose work included an exhibition about the backyard side of Vesterbro.
The previous year he had helped starting the school but he couldn't find the money to enrol in the first course. Instead, he photographed in his spare time, and as he often came round, it was only natural that the first class invited him to participate in their exhibition although he was not a student. That August he took part in the Copenhagen Photomarathon and got the first prize: dkr 10,000 that he immediately invested in his school fee. His name was Johnny Jensen.
And he was on. He had a house, a wife, children, and he got a leave from his work for half a year. Every morning he arrived punctually for his classes, and at 11:30 he unpacked his lunch box and had his sandwiches just like he had done before. The first 14 days he took documentary pictures, but then he got Per Bak Jensen as a teacher, and since then nothing has been the same for Johnny.
Johnny was sent to the Museum of Zoology to photograph. There he found a spirit-conserved elephant foetus, took a close-up of it, and manipulated the print with bleacher.
Since then Johnny has not taken a single reportage picture: he was traded to the realm of Free Art. As a graduation project he photographed Laura, naked, with adhesive tape strips over her mouth, and with a monkey foetus in her hands. Yellowed by bleacher.
Today Johnny is one of Denmark's leading art photographers, but it all started with the spirit elephant foetuses. In Per Bak's weeks. Something big was unleashed in Johnny, he rejected what he had previously had faith in, his value system changed beyond recognition; after the aborted elephant, a picture for him was supposed to have objectives completely different from what he had believed. He had seen the light.
And he took the consequences.
That picture hung on the school-office notice-board for many years as an example to those students who had stalled of what a picture can achieve. The power of photography.
Johnny's pictures were not only a catalyst for his new life, they were the beginning of the bleacher period.
When you apply bleacher with a sponge to a developed paper print, you remove a layer from the black silver, and the subject of a completely dark picture becomes lighter and comes to the foreground where you want it. This gives the picture a characteristic yellowish glow, vintage-like, coarse and worn out. This technique was used on countless occasions in the following years.
When Jacob Fenger enrolled in the school, he ran into the midst of the bleacher period. The bleach-and-scratch period. After his spell at the school Johnny Jensen had a great success with his 'Borderland' exhibition where he had imprinted sketches into his bleached prints of abnormal human foetuses. Morten Sabroe, whose wife was pregnant at the time, used many newsprint columns in the daily Information to explain how sick and disgusting it all was, and that it was not art at all. The article was echoed in the other media and made Johnny famous: it injected new vitality into the bleach-and-scratch period.
During his time at the school Jacob worked with calm and determination to elevate, in his own sober-minded fashion, the bleach-and-sketch technique to a higher level. His subjects were marked by randomness until, after a year at the school, he made a picture of himself with his torso naked and his eyes closed, and applied bleacher and scratches to it. He reproduced it in colour, and was proud when the Politiken daily used it as an illustration to a review of our students' work exhibition. For a year-and-a-half at the school he had mastered the technique and had simplified his subjects so that at the final viewing they appeared as three almost identical pictures of deserted hillsides. Rough, heavy, massive and disturbing. The pictures were framed in some crude, welded metal frames, the whole thing was singular, accomplished, strong. I commended the three mountain-sides, but there was also a fourth picture. It was slovenly, un-sharp, looked like a reproduction of a close-up; it did not fit the series, it was unfinished and bad.
'This,' I said, having slated it, 'this is too much.'
'Just wait a little,' Jacob said calmly from his place on the sofa at the back of the room, 'it's going to get much wilder.'
He was right. It did become wilder. The mountain pictures got him into the Royal Academy of Art where Rasmus Nielsen and Bjørnstjerne Reuter Christiansen, with both of whom Jacob had gone to Fatamorgana and had worked in the art group SUPERFLEX, were accepted. Since then, they have collectively made their mark in Danish and international art life with their disturbing projects.
One of them was to sell a secret to state institutions. The secret, in a small, taped box, would be revealed after it had been sold. The earnest negotiations with the Mayor and the Municipality Director at one end of the table and the three artists wearing neckties at the other were immortalised on film. With the secret lying mid-way on the table. Marketing is an important element of their work, and it is with pride that I wear a patch sewn on my jacket that advertises another project by them: Flexpoint. I do not know what the project is about, but I have no doubts that it is exorbitant.
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When Søren Bidstrup, Jacob Carlsen and Anders Vendelbo came to the school, they knew that they wanted to be press photographers, and none of the guest lecturers succeeded in instilling other ideas in them. They aspired direct to the Danish School of Journalism Department of Photography in Århus, and today work at the major dailies Berlingske Tidende, Politiken and Ekstra Bladet respectively.
One day Nan Goldin came to visit. The students had specifically collected their best pictures, and they took their turns to show them to Nan who gave back praise or criticism. When it was Anders Vendelbo's turn, he produced his series about the brewery horses at Carlsberg. Nan looked at the pictures for a long time, took some of them nearer her eyes, moved them around a bit, and then said,
'I can see that your paragon is Koudelka.'
Anders beamed with pride. If he should compare himself with anyone, then it was the famous Joseph Koudelka whose personal style had created through the years a school of thought for a whole generation of documentary photographers throughout the world. But Nan added,
'Wouldn't it be an idea to photograph like Anders Vendelbo?'
The smile stiffened, his face looked wry, he was about to crawl under the sofa.
In 1999 he was named Press Photographer of the Year.
When Nicolai Howalt applied to the school for the first time, he was too young, and he was advised to exercise by shooting two rolls of film a day until he could try again. He did. And it helped. He was still young, but now his pictures were so full of life, experience and a desire to speak out, that he qualified for admission.
Nicolai was smitten by photography. Reportage. And he wanted to be good. He always worked, and he loved it. Time and again he searched for his chosen places and people, and there was always something that could be done better. He demanded a lot of himself, of the teachers, and of the other students. His temperamental and extrovert nature left its mark on the school, and he was one of the reasons for the jealousy the more placid students felt. They worked with self-conscious, sensitive pictures of moods, and they thought there was too much talk of reportage.
When Henrik Saxgren, Kent Klich or Per Folkver came as guest lecturers, he took everything hungrily in, when Per Bak Jensen or Erik Steffensen had a talk, he did not attend at all, and no-one tried to get him to be more tolerant or understanding. Nothing was more tedious for him than philosophical ramifications about the nature of photography.
When Nicolai had been at the school for a year and wanted to continue, we had to find a reason to convince his father that he should again pay his tuition fees. So we invented the Master Class. In an authentically-looking curriculum I scrupulously described what was supposed to happen in this fictive class, what tasks the students should accomplish, when there were courses in flash photography and colour studies. For a change, it looked like 'standard' education in photography. We did not need to tell that Nicolai was the only student in that class, neither that he had decided not to change his line of work in the coming year. The father paid, and Nicolai went on.
At one point towards the end of his second year I felt I couldn't tell him anything that I hadn't said before. I thought he had made a colossal progress and he was now able to go it alone, it was only experience that he lacked. I mentioned it to him, but in contrast to my expectations he got offended and said he wanted to continue with his routine studies like he had done before. He did.
He had had 16 different guest lecturers when he left the school but that had not jumbled him one bit. From the first day he knew what he wanted, and no-one tried to press him into anything else.
Today he is the cleverest among the younger Danish documentary photographers, and has been awarded numerous Danish and international prizes. His father has no reason to reproach me that Nicolai never got educated in flash photography or colour studies.
Mark St. John Newell was an American who had tried for many years to find a photography school in the USA but had never come to one that satisfied him. A Danish girlfriend sent him a translation of Fatamorgana's brochure, and he immediately became all fire: that was the school he had been looking for. He was accepted as a student and moved to Denmark. He did not consider it a problem that the classes were in Danish. He would tape what was being said, and in the evening his girlfriend would translate. The portfolio he sent in in the beginning was pretty, aesthetic and uninteresting. It was 'correct'. The printing was good, the mounts were fine, the pictures had no content. Lovely, indifferent shots in a nice black box.
At school he began taking out-of-focus pictures. From project to project the un-sharpness increased, and in the course of the year he spent at the school, he persistently worked his way through all the grades of being out-of-focus. He constructed various pinhole cameras, first small, made of film tins, then bigger, until one day he came up with a pinhole camera made of a cardboard box with a hole as large as a buttonhole. Each day he put a sheet of unexposed paper in the box, brought it to town, opened the hole, and exposed. Because the hole was small in relation to the box, his exposure times were long. Late one warm spring afternoon he returned with the cardboard box in his arms and the most exhilarated expression on his face that divulged his great, wonderful secret.
'I have made the picture of my lifetime,' he said, and looked like an infatuated someone who had finally found the most wonderful woman in the world.
He had gone to the dike near Amagerfælled and had sat on the grass next to his camera while it exposed the vista over to Copenhagen. His exposure time was 8 hours. These had been the best hours of his life.
He went back to the USA a clarified and happy man. He never understood what was said in Danish, and he never made those tape-recordings he imagined he would, but he had discovered himself through photography.
I have always spoken of being able to discover yourself through photography. This is in fact what photography is best suited for. If you use it seriously, photography as an art form is a tool for self-recognition that can give the students the confidence necessary for them to encounter the world with openness. To work creatively does not mean to be inventive, but to be able to use your subconscious. To use your hidden resources, to follow your intuition.
Personality is not anything you learn or that can directly be expressed. But you can see it in art. An artists does not make his picture, he is it. Deep inside, all photographs are self-portraits.
I have often spoken of photography as self-portraiture, but I have not meant to say that the students themselves should appear on their own pictures.
Anne Bjerge had a spell of training at Det Fri Aktuelt daily while she was at the school. She wanted to become a press photographer. But with her curious nature and her open, creative attitude, she experimented with all the photographic genres, and managed, in the course of her search, to identify herself as a nude self-portrait model in a grove.
At the viewing I praised three of her pictures for being lively, straightforward and exciting, but criticised the fourth because I thought it was stiff, distanced and awkard. I called it an anthropology study, and I did not mean it as a compliment. When Anne did not join us after lunch and I asked the other students why she hadn't come, Elisabeth replied with a sense of injured solidarity,
'You shouldn't have said that her picture was embarassing.'
In two years time Anne applied simultaneously at the University of Gothenburg and at the Glasgow School of Art. She was accepted at both institutions and chose to go to Scotland. Laura Eriksen, who attended the University of Gothenburg, was present at the selection panel, and she told me later that the anthropological self-portrait had clearly been the best picture. It was Anne's main asset for being accepted.
I keep it on a shelf at home: Shortly before she left for Scotland, Anne came over carrying two bottles of red wine and her self-portrait in a frame. She had written under the photograph with a sharp pencil, 'Woman know your body'. The truth is that to Anne that picture was much more than an image of her own body.
By the way, she fell in love with her professor in Glasgow and they now live together in Scotland.
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Anne's subject was used again in countless variations with greater and greater inventiveness.
I must confess that I finally got slightly tired of girls who throughout their courses only photographed themselves nude in all sort of possible and impossible acrobatic postures. This was slightly stretching it over the limit, and in the end died out on its own.
In her great love sorrow Helle Weitling embarked upon making a series of pictures of herself where she cut her heart out of her body. To accomplish this she had borrowed a long kitchen knife and had bought a pig's heart from the butcher's. I did not have great expectations of the pictures, but respected her attempts to live over her predicament through photography, although I feared a facetious, not to say an awkward result. But my fears were dispersed: the picture with a heart coming into the open out of a slid breast was charged with all the ardour, anger and powerlessness Helle felt. It was not only her best picture, it was the best of all the variations on the nude self-portrait theme.
Maiken Nilsson was not huffy and unhappy but laughing and vivacious. She loved surprises in her pictures. In her I-exist picture there is an young, naked girl who is holding a huge sausage in her hands. A-metre-and-a-half-long, home-made. To eschew exhibiting her own thin body, long limbs and small breasts, Maiken had asked a pretty friend to sit in. The result was not outstanding but it led her on in her investigation of the animal entrails she bought in the morning and had her friend pose with in the evening. The liver was best.
If the picture had been intended as a satirical protest against the prevalent trend, it would have been a total failure. Instead, it became one of that period's most outstanding nudes that entailed both knowledge, personality and courage. So, in that way, it remained a self-portrait.
Many years after Maiken had left, it adorned the back cover of the school's folder though few could see from afar that the nicely-shaped, smooth, dark object the girl is holding in her hands is a liver.
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When Malene Bang had to make a choice, she always fully trusted her intuition. Her feeling. One day her feeling told her her next project was to be pictures at a bull farm. She got excited by the prospect and spoke agitatedly of how the bulls' semen was tapped, while I leafed through the numerous contact prints from her first days of shooting. The pictures were a disorganised mix of haphazard tourist snapshots and mediocre reportage. I tried to find several pictures to be used as leads for her future work but every time I pointed at a picture she would say, 'No, it's not the one I want.'
A couple of days later she again sat on the sofa with a new set of contact prints. This time she had handled it in a more painterly fashion, with shots of structures, surfaces, spots on the floor. But she was again discontent. Regardless of what I proposed her feeling told her it was not what she really wanted. The situation re-played itself, only next time it was forms and lines, and then again with close-ups, and I thought she had gone through all genres in the history of photography without being gratified.
By making control prints of all shots I had proposed, she indicated her good will but it didn't help: it was just not what she wanted.
At the viewing she produced 25 colour prints that together formed one large picture with a greenish glow. Of the bull. The picture was void of any sentiment, mood, inclination, structur, forms, it was not the story of a happening or of a condition, neither was it a fascinating tale or modified ennui, and Malene was relieved. Finally she had found what she didn't know she was searching for: a picture that in simplified form stated, 'The bull exists.'
A couple of the greenish colour prints were, according to Malene's feeling, slightly wrong in nuance, but, generally, the feeling had said yes.
During the remaining year-and-half that Malene attended the school she photographed things because they existed. Her graduation project consisted of three identical pictures of the Earth as seen from outer space. Reproductions from a NASA brochure.
Qualified reproductions like that were also used by Eva Mertz, who had flung her love over a series of pictures of sombre and erect turn-of-the-century American Indian chieftains that she had dug out of an old encyclopaedia. With a blend of inner pride and departed impotence the people on those pictures conveyed the message that they existed.
After her graduation Malene went on to the Glasgow School of Art and Eva produced many stimulating exhibitions. Her still continuing project is a large-scale photograph that consists of many small pictures each showing a herring's head against a dark background. Eva had personally cut every head off the fish when she worked at a fishing factory.
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The underlying history or impulses were hidden, what remained were only the absurd marks they had left on the present. It was not a puzzle to be solved, the secret the picture contained was not to be revealed, it was not supposed to be answering disbelieving questions, but pose new ones.
Anja differed from the other girls at the school as her everyday attire was a long dress and high-heeled shoes. She read poetry and was never hesitant about what she wanted of her art. She did not particularly need to discover herself through photography but she felt a strong necessity to express who she was. She protested loudly if anyone tried to interpret her mystic pictures: the photographs were to be accepted, not understood. Their visual elements were not symbols, they were just there. Their positioning had no meaning, it was just like that. Art meant severing the moorings without losing the quality. The question 'Why?' was anathema in the mystic period.
Søren Raagaard was also producing mystic images. Collages where everything visually possible was amalgamated without anyone having to look for a common denominator or a red thread. Photographs, cut-outs, letters, reproductions, pieces of text, everything could be used. The more ambiguous, the better.
Later, a sort of emancipating contentment engulfed the projects. Something disengaging; the pictures would not hold a promise of any kind. Productivity was enormous. At one point the most active formed a club and would occasionally meet at night and make mystic prints in the darkroom. In the morning we could see the results of the night's work hanging on the walls.
Those students who had started at the school with the conviction that they should be producing sterling reportage for the rest of their days, were enthralled by the wild, the disengaged, the experimental and the mystic, and succumbed to floating around in reality, so it became a little lighter.
A little more daring. They started using photographic methods they couldn't control, and turned the inevitable mistakes into assets. The naughtier, the better. Classic reportage was cast aside, and the documentary photographers, too, followed suit.
Trine Søndergaard lived in a block of flats in Skelbækgade in Vesterbro. For her graduation project she decided to photograph, in her own unique way, her neighbours from the entrance she lived in. In a combination of reportage, staged photography and accessory-supported portraiture she created a series of fervent and daring pictures. There was nothing haughty or disrespectful about the pictures that bubbled with affectionate satire. Clever enough, around the time of the school's graduation exhibition, she approached the Politiken daily, and they used her pictures in three full pages. It led to an invitation to exhibit at Charlottenborg where she chose to show the prostitutes from her street. The pictures, this time in colour, have the same straightforward, playful character as her graduation project, but their effect is even stronger because gravity joins the game.
The series is a novelty in Danish documentary photography, and its next showing will be at the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg.
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Choki Lindberg also wanted to go to New York. She was very young and professionally immature, the quality of her pictures was not exceptional, and I advised her not to apply. She groped her way for solutions, and it was difficult for her to find out what she wanted of her photography. But she was an incredible go-getter and she was extremely impatient. It just couldn't go fast enough.
She stayed away from school in the weeks leading up to the graduation project completion, and she just appeared for the viewing. With the most incredible picture sequence. Portraits.
The light was right, the expression was fine, the precision was top class. The people in the photographs were very different from each other, with each reflecting a strictly defined culture or a well-known environment. There was a posh black-haired lady, and an over-decorated naughty blonde, and an ornamented Muslim woman, and an young soldier with moustaches, and a few others. Everybody played their special role: to look the way they did. They were not alive, they did not have a personal character, but were interesting because of the information emitted by their appearances. But despite their differences they had something in common: the peculiar likeness of their facial features.
Choki had photographed herself. She had used a toupee, make-up, and a pair of false moustaches, and trinkets and a headscarf, and she had done it so meticulously and convincingly that the image series assumed a great quality. The accomplished art of masquerade. Self-staged theatre. Choki had seriously accepted the consequences of the fact that she hadn't 'found' herself and, instead, chose to play with the thought, 'Who can I be?'.
The pictures radiated intelligence, will and experience, and qualified her for admission at the ICP that she so ardently wanted.
The mystic period had made a turn. While staged photography sessions had previously consisted of re-arranging reality, cautiously adding elements and orchestrating smaller arrangements, Choki's portraits made way for pure theatrical photography. Surreal extravagances. That everything should be light, fast and disengaged was no longer the trend. Visual seriousness had made a comeback.
Henrik Christiansen looked uninterested and flabby the first half year he attended school. Was often absent, did not participate with resolution.
I reproached him for his sloppy discipline, lack of creativity and indecisive pictures, but it didn't help. But the moment I threatened him that if he continued like that he would end up as a supermarket cashier, something happened. He began to make staged photography. Satirical, surreal scenarios.
In his parents' kitchen and living-room he arranged quotidian objects in various tableaux with his father and mother as models, and with 15 brown hens he had released over them. The pictures were not funny. They were grotesque. From afar they emanated revolt, not the impulsive kind adolescents feel against their parents, but a mature, seriously-meant revolt against bourgeoisie's fundamentals. He had the protest in him, but had never let it out. As a person he was still, introvert, self-conscious, but in his satirical pictures he was sharp, violent and expressive.
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He was closely related to his grandmother, and when she died, lying in bed with a peaceful look on her face, it was natural for Henrik to start taking pictures of her. His mother who stood nearby would help, and she proposed to bring in the hens.
It had become such an ordinary part of their day that whenever Henrik would photograph the hens should arrive.
While I studied the contact prints of hens flipping their wings around the dead granny, I said almost to myself, 'God knows what she would have said to this.'
'She would have been very happy,' said Henrik with great confidence. 'She always wanted to have her picture taken with the hens.'
During the rest of the year-and-half Henrik attended school his work was determined, energetic and expressive, and involved grotesque and often absurd photography.
Another qualified rebel was Jacob Eskildsen. In one of his first projects he had to choose between Assignment 1, which was documentary, and Assignment 2, that was evocative. At the viewing, when I asked him which one had had selected, he replied, 'Assignment 3'.
In the middle hang an ugly flash photograph of a tramped patch, shot at night, full of a feeling of coldness. Around it were pictures of a cigarette butt, a glove, a rope, a hair, a crumpled scrap of paper, all photographed in a flat, indirect light on a white background. The setting resembled the scene of a crime, and the pictures were the evidence: Jacob had done what he could to make them look as if they had just been taken out of a police department folder and were now laid down in front of a homicide detective.
During the fortnight the students had attended school I had pointed out to them various possibilities of working with photography as art, and it was likely that I had named police evidence shots as not being art. Jacob had seized that and used it as a challenge. His staged photography screamed of ice-cold, anonymous registration. With their sharpness, lightning and placement the objects he had photographed longed to be taken gravely. To be used as evidence.
But the pictures were not police evidence, they were art. Brilliant art that protested against the teacher's directions and that negated established norms and expected notions. Art that stole the importance and meaning of evidence and made them its own.
The conceptual period had announced its beginning.
At an exhibition the school held at the House of Film there hang a long row of 13x18 cm colour prints side by side with each other as if forming a circuit that span round a corner and went on under the other exhibited pictures. It was Jessica Vulpius's conceptual project. For a week she had photographed everything that she had eaten or drunk, every bite, every drop. She used an automatic camera, the kind that had its flash pop up when it was too dark. A project of ideas that contained the perpetuity of mathematics and the charisma of chance. Her painstaking food statistics were imbued with something like gallows humour, a Gallup opinion-poll satire. Taking the poll's as her cue she had jumped into her personal, visual food enumeration. At a closer range, the pictures were subjective, nimble, awry and private, at a distance they were a fascinating, variegated sequence.
Jessica had seriously worked with photography for a year but had never really been satisfied with what she did. She was happy now. She was both relieved and proud when she saw that her project of ideas functioned the way she had meant it.
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At the December 1998 exhibition, among the conceptual projects there were 25 grave tops in the island of Fyn, 60 versions of a spot on a floor carpet, 30 probably haphazard shots of a hotel room in Poland. The underlying element was not beauty, distortion, wisdom or indifference but a sense for the systematic. Not the quality of the single picture, the logic of the continuity was what was decisive. The underlying idea.
After his Polish project Frank Hansen wanted to continue working with conceptual photography. His dedicated efforts ended with having each picture shot and selected so that, within the succession of the others, it was important; this was the end of randomness. An image was not to imply a particular mood, a message, an action or a meaning, it was not to be descriptive or biased, it was just supposed to be there. The concept was that the images existed in their continuity and signified their own presence alone. They ought not to have been loaded with values, but should just provoke interest by virtue of their necessity. Some pictures were to be outgoing, others were meant as contemplation. Frank was praised for his ongoing project.
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He showed 12 slides taken by his maternal grandfather on a mid-1950s tour in the Alps. Old, clumsy, apathetic, tame, meaningless amateur snapshots, totally devoid of life, mood, colour, action, structure, composition, no hint of an idea, attitude, personality or persuasion, the pictures were miserably dull, entirely indifferent. Without any value.
Without reserve, I told him this, but it did not seem to disturb him. He denied that there was an attempt at provocation, and explained that he spent a month fumbling through his grandfather's slides, and had found those twelve that he thought should be shown.
Had I been cool-headed instead of irascible, pedagogic instead of impulsive, if I, instead of falling into the trap of what I felt was a provocation, had seen the images in a larger context, I probably wouldn't have become so exasperated.
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All his creative solutions closed in on one subject: the image. His work with photography was often a study in what a picture is.
Grandpa's Alps series was the tentative aim of his research. The pictures were clinically purged of everything that had value. There was nothing in them that could encourage the viewer's imagination. The subject was so illuminating that I couldn't see it, 'The picture exists.'
Not the person, not the bull or the planet, but the picture.
And like Anne's no-longer-awkward pictures had been the harbinger of a new trend, so will Christian's no-longer-indifferent borrowed slides turn to be the beginning of a new period at Fatamorgana. Frank had sought after the picture of the value-less, Christian had found the value-less itself.
When I founded the school I promised to myself that, within the rules, everything was possible. I had to bear the consequences now. To point out the valueless is also a possibility.
When in April 1999 I was a guest at the opening of the Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition, I carried two long-stemmed roses. One was for Christian who had six of his grandpa's slides he had submitted accepted to the show, and the other was for Kristinn Mår Ingvarsson who had his four pictures accepted. If having Christian's pictures accepted was a failure for me, that Kristinn's also were was a consolation. For, in his frustration of being unable to choose among his many small and unsophisticated snapshots, he had come to the school one day and had spread over on two adjoining tables in front of me every single picture he had taken since he had begun photographing, asking me to make that difficult decision.
That's the way it should be. So long as I should just select the best pictures, it can pay back to listen to my advice. But if you should create a new trend, you must go your own way.
The Alpine memories turned out to be quite valuable for Christian, as the Danish State Fund for the Arts purchased two of grandpa's found-again slides at dkr 4000. Some might be inclined to argue that it was grandpa and not Christian that was the artist, but they are not right. The artistic work was not to take the pictures, but to find them and to show them.
It was like this 30 years ago when sculptor Peter Bonnén exhibited cracked tiles he had, with the blessing of the authorities, dug up from around Copenhagen's pavements. He went round in the city's streets for weeks selecting for himself those best-of-all crackled tiles.
This is what he said one day at the school when he came to talk about art. He gave a square sheet of paper to all the students and asked them to tear it in two pieces. All got something different in the end, and he analysed the different types of tear, and characterised the students according to how their pieces of paper had been severed.
'For 30 years,' he said and took a massive iron cube in his hand, 'I have tried to take apart a cube like this. It has always been 10 in height, 10 in breadth, and 9 in length. Every time I made a sculpture where I had taken apart such a cube in a given way, I have realised that I could have done it in a different way. I will never stop tearing apart this cube.'
To make art is to choose one's own cube, to make the decision to take it apart, and to just do it with fantasy and personality, with intuition and resolution. Make a good cut, find a good crack. And when you are finished you can start anew, for it will never be the same next time.
Set some rules, determine a method, and fill up with fantasy.
To create a school is not much different.
When Peter Bonnén packed his cube in his bag and was on his way out of the door, he said to me, 'To be only a teacher, isn't it really boring?'
Translated from the Danish by Anthony Georgieff
*A pun combining "ordblinde" (word-blind) with "blænde", the Danish for "aperture". (transl.)