Swedish High School Students In Two Memorable Photography Projects

Project 1: Flowering Diversity - Slideshow and Posters

From the early-90s I worked at Swedish Senior Secondary schools, teaching mainly Graphic Communication, Photography and Video. It was not uncommon that special student-projects were arranged, parallel to regular classroom instruction. Usually the project work was largely integrated with regular courses, but often a portion remained "outside" as extracurricular activity.

In 1998 a sizable master-package of student projects was designed and organized by several teachers in the school. It contained several individual projects.

External funding became available after a lengthy application procedure. In the package was student art work, a traveling student art exhibition, fashion design using industrial waste, plus the ensuing catwalk shows at major Swedish Cultural Museums. 

This all started before my time, but a good number of participating students were in my classes, so it was easy for me to join the project in the later stages with photo and video documentation.

Furthermore, since not all funds had been used up, I could create a spin-off project on my own, involving traditional photography, modelling, slide scanning, image processing and graphic design.

The motivation was this: Our school was in contact with an organization called INEPS, International Network of Productive Learning Projects and Schools. INEPS hosted  many activities, one of them at the time was a call for student-art work to be displayed at the UN Headquarters in New York. This exhibition was to be a part of the 50th anniversary of the Declaration Of Human Rights, to be opened by Kofi Annan himself.

Kofi Annan  UN General Secretary 97 -06

The theme of the exhibition was Human Rights and the Equal Value Of All Human Beings. If we succeeded in fitting imagery we could be part of the New York exhibition!

Doing some homework with soundtrack design

As an aficionado of multi-projector slide/sound shows using programmed cross-fade transitions, my primary aim was set! However, it became pretty clear that a show of this type only would work near us, where we ourselves could be in control of the tricky projection technology. But images are flexible, we decided to create two large posters alongside. These would be entered for the NY exhibition.
For some time I had privately taken pictures at the so-called Azalea Valley, a small part of central Gothenburg's largest park. The narrow valley provides shelter from three sides which the Azalea bushes seem to like. In the month of May the valley is in full bloom and offers an amazing sight. The idea to use this enticing setting for a type of portraiture occurred to me before, now was a chance to act upon it. The guiding motif during the photography/modelling phase was a suggested analogy between the Azalea's variety of form and color and the variety of humans according to their different origins on this planet. On top, blooming and youthful beauty is something to be cherished and celebrated with all its facets.
Flowering Diversity became the English project title, derived from the Swedish Mångfalden blomstrar.
The original art/fashion project had attracted mostly female students, due to the extensive fashion design and catwalk component. It felt thus natural that only girls joined my new sub-project group. There was some criticism of the gender-imbalance (to be rectified in the next project!).
The actual project-work was an amazing experience, opening new perspectives for my own development and leaving a strong impression on the participants.

"Diversity"-posters at a drive in Central Gothenburg for our suburban school

The idea to arrange images on posters proved fruitful even in our local environment. Our school had a tradition with public relation events in order to get some positive media attention, vital for a school placed in an immigrant-rich suburb. The choice of school is free in Sweden, even within the Public system. So new students have to be attracted to a school. Our poster material came in handy at info stands and wall displays. Many variations were made, much material found its way into the school's promotional brochures and websites.
In Sweden it is not politically correct to exploit female "attractiveness" in promotional material, at least not in the Public Service field.  But I believe that our concept had more advantages than disadvantages. Traditionally, the public's image of an immigrant suburb heavily builds on tense and dangerous looking male youngsters. One does not readily think of relaxed and sensitive females, seemingly comfortably settled in harmonious surroundings. We are talking about two different cliches here, but a shift from an aggressive to a more alluring one had a noticeable effect on the attention we received. We who worked in the suburbs knew that our reality was made up of a wide range of experiences. For many outsiders though suburbia was a coin with only one face. With our project at least we tried to suggest another side.

Interestingly, even the local Parksboard in charge of the Azalea Valley had noticed our "Diversity" posters and contacted the school. They liked our material having elevated their "child" alongside our students. According to them, much love and labor goes into the Azalea area, constantly replacing plants that died through severe cold or other causes.
The original image show used 35mm Kodachrome slides. For work with posters and brochures these slides had to be scanned. At the time ('98), only the commercial Kodak Photo-CD  process yielded the necessary high quality digital images. Much of our funding was eaten up by this very expensive way to go.
The pictures to be actually used in slide show and poster had to be selected from a much larger total yield. Each participant would clearly mark the slides that were OK to use. Even more clearly marked were those not to be used under any circumstances. In some cases the selection did not conform with my own preferences. But that both students and staff could stand behind the production 100 % was an absolute requirement and gave the project the strength it needed.
The digital version of the slide/sound show presented here is almost identical with the analogue original and uses only images from the original slides. Since zooming and panning was not really possible in analogue slide shows, the digital version does not use them either.
Nobody from our school could be present at the UN exhibition in New York City, but several reports that reached us were positive, even enthusiastic.  Needless to say that our confidence for conducting similar photo-projects grew considerably. Whether the exhibition really was opened by Kofi Annan himself never became quite clear to us. He was certainly a popular person in Sweden and spent much time in the country, since his wife is from Stockholm.
(For a later show on the Azalea Valley dedicated to George Harrison click on this link.)

Project 2: Magic Alive - Photography Under The Wings Of History

Fort Bohus Today

In the school year 98-99 I taught in two different High Schools, about 16 km apart. Halfway in between these schools was the small town of Kungälv with its famous landmark, the remains of Bohus Fortress. Ever since witnessing an extensive Medieval Festival at the fortress in the early 90's, I realized the ruin's value as a photographic backdrop. Going back to the year 1308, the site is one of the few genuinely medieval leftovers in our area, offering unique opportunities for creating images with historic associations.

Encouraged by the positive experience of the ”Flowering Diversity” Photography project in the previous spring, I planned a project at Fort Bohus with students from both my schools participating.

Just as in the previous project, there was no script for an eventual slide show, just a tentative guiding principle: to "relocate" a very contemporary and real situation in Swedish schools to the Middle Ages, namely the meeting of the ”Children of the Vikings” with ”Freedom Seekers from Around the World”. In contemporary terms: the high influx of refugees from war-torn countries, dictatorships, failed-states, poverty ridden peoples and repressed minorities. Most teachers and students at the time experienced this type of meeting and blending in our schools as something positive, hopeful and trail-blazing.

Historic Fort Bohus

This guideline was discussed with the interested students, plus ideas for possible individual or group posings. We also talked about clothes, necklaces, trinkets, hairdos etc. plus other helpful articles with ”period” associations. These points I put down in writing and distributed the notes to interested students. For more detailed planning - like detailed location scouting - there was no time. Almost everything was left to chance and spur of the moment decisions.

Nine students participated as models, including three young men. Two other male students joined as independent photographers, working with black and white film. My cameras were loaded with Kodachrome 64 and Ektachrome 160.

The image show made extensive use of graphics, image manipulation and digital typesetting, all part of our regular course specifications. But it was not possible to leave the graphic work of ”Magic Alive” - as the project came to be called - to students.

William Turner 1775-1851

Working on my own with these segments taught me a lot, e.g. turning many images into fake night shots, scanning and manipulation of William Turner's famous watercolors and the conversion of regular typeface into multicolored versions. To then transmit my newly acquired
know-how to the students was easy: they embraced these techniques fast and energetically.
Generally, it was not easy in those days for a middle-aged teacher to be ahead of the students in digital knowledge. But the edge in vision as to how to employ the new techniques for defined goals and purposes was crucial in project work.

The "Magic Alive" project was a big challenge in many ways. The groups from the two schools met at the fortress for the first time. Besides individual portraits I also wanted group pictures. These were more demanding to arrange and required a lot of directive instructions on my part, with all my non-existing experience in this matter... But the spirit of the event was phantastic, the performance inspired. A lot of the impulses for images came from the students, exploring and testing all the time, on and off camera. They continuously pointed out new locations, new constellations, new angles, also in their work with the assistant B/W photographers.
It rarely happens today, almost twenty years later, that I meet a participating student. But inevitably they will mention our photo-project as a memorable experience.

Even this project generated some posters. Aesthetically they were pleasing, but neither the posters nor the image material as such proved to be overly valuable for the schools' promotional publications. Viewed out of context, the images' historical associations were not as easily understandable as the flowery results from the previous project.