Food for thought.

ODENSE FOTO TRIENNALE

ODENSE, DENMARK

OCTOBER 4-29, 2006

Choosing a theme for a photography festival is a rather fraught business. It must be both general enough so artists may interpret the theme without constraint and contain enough detail to bring an overall coherence to the project. For a triennale curated out of a small museum in Denmark, this is even more problematic because a festival that takes place only every three years has a tendency to drop off the radar of photographers and curators alike. The Odense Foto Triennale (OFT) was created by Finn Thrane, director of the Museet for Fotokunst (the Museum of Photographic Art), in a former clothing factory in Odense, the third largest city in Denmark and the capital of the island of Funen. Now in its third run, OFT is the exception that proves the rule. Following up on its previous themes, "Slowness" (2000) and "Group View" (2003), this year's "Mad" ("Food" in Danish) provided a banquet of opportunities for artistic expression and resulted in a feast for the eyes.

With more than forty photographers in thirty-five exhibitions in twenty-one venues in and about Odense, home of Hans Christian Andersen, the OFT addressed the global theme of food in compelling ways. The politics of food--production, marketing, and its effects on different populations--was a major theme. The economic nature of food was examined in imagery by Steven Benson of the farmers and fishers displaced during the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China; in Andreas Weinand's elegiac work, "acker*arable land" (1999-2004), depicting holdouts of ecological farming in heavily industrialized Essen, Germany; in photojournalist Matthew Sleeth's ironic take on grocery shopping, "Call of the Wild" (2004); and in Felicia Webb's haunting project on obesity and bulimia in the West, "The Forbidden Body" (2006). On the other hand, Heidi Bradner's series on food and survival in Siberia, "Midnight's Lands" (2005); Angelica Julner's imagery from small slaughterhouses in third-world communities, "Sand [Blood]" (2006); Numo Rama's work from slaughterhouses in the rural Brazil of his birth, "Carnivores" (2006); and Finn Larsen's two bodies of work on fishing and farming in Greenland, "Nerisassat [Food]" (2006) and "Tamaviaartumik [Passion]" (2006), told of worlds still directly connected to a socially integrated food chain.

Food as a socially binding material--think of families gathered around a meal, breaking bread, eating soup, etc.--has largely been displaced in the helter-skelter, shop/work-til-you-drop West. As "The Banquet," the exhibition curated from the Museet for Fotokunst's archive shows, it was not always so. In addition to images of families preparing and eating food in the 1800s and early twentieth century, there were more politically charged photos, such as those in "Zona," Carl de Keyzer's series of images from 2000-2003 of Russian prisoners in a Siberian camp sharing a skimpy meal. Nicolai Howalt and Trine Sondergaard exhibited "How to Hunt" (2005), an extended body of work about hunting traditions as a group activity that replicated traditional Danish landscape paintings from the early 1900s.

Of course, art and food have for thousands of years been part and parcel--from sixteenth-century allegorical Dutch still-lifes to more recent whimsical works such as Anne-Li Engstrom's "Food Scapes" (2006) and Rafaelo Kazakov's "Glut" (2000), which took a more macro approach to the shape and texture of edible flesh. Poul Ib Henriksen's own still-lifes of various sea creatures doing impossible things, "Maritime Polaroids" (2006), were both delicate and playful while Sian Bonnell's "Everyday Dada" (2006) reconstructed Dadaist and Constructivist icons of the 1920s and 1930s with slices of cheese and sausage or bread. The irrepressible Martin Parr depicted consumers and soon to be consumed foods--sausages, Halloween cupcakes, tins of fish paste--in his typically ironic and garish fashion in his series "Pantry" (2006). Russian photographer Vadim Gushchin brought majesty to the simplest of staples, bread, in his lyrical black-and-white images of loaves of bread set against unadorned, dark backgrounds.

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All this food for thought leads one to examine the role of a photography festival of this nature and its relative importance in the world of photography. The OFT is a rare species: intelligently curated, wide-ranging, and international in scope. In addition to presenting foreign artists to relatively tiny Denmark and exposing Danes to wider perspectives, the festival travels many of its shows, reversing the procedure by bringing Danes out into the world. Additionally, the OFT has a portfolio review component modeled on the format pioneered by the Houston FotoFest. Some twenty-four reviewers from nine countries brought their expertise to students and emerging artists over the course of two long afternoons. For young photographers the chance to meet with senior curators including Alejandro Castellote, a founder of Photo Espana; Andrea Holzherr of Magnum Photos, Paris; Vaclav Macek of Bratislava, Slovakia; Alison Nordstrom of George Eastman House in Rochester, New York; and Tina Schelhorn of Galerie Lichtblick in Cologne, Germany, allowed a wealth of information and experience that the Internet cannot replace even in totally wired Scandinavia. The honor reviewers brought to two photographers--Diana Scherer for her images of children and Ditte Haarlov Johnsen for her environmental portraits of friends in her adopted country of Mozambique--will be invaluable to their careers.

Like all rare creatures, the OFT is on the endangered species list. At a time when cultural budgets are getting slashed to bring state budgets into line, museums and the like are suddenly forced to adapt to a completely new environment. In Scandinavia especially, the tradition of cultural philanthropy by the state is long established while one of private or corporate giving is all but nonexistent. In upcoming years, institutions such as the OFT will have to scramble for support in order to continue their phenomenal work. The photo community, especially artists who have been exhibited by these festivals, should send support whether in the form of donations or letters of support that can be used to demonstrate the importance of such venues as they struggle to raise money from new sources who may be unaware of what good the OFT and others do for art and culture both domestically and internationally. It is a symbiotic relationship: artists serve the institutions that serve them. As Catherine Chalmers points out in her well-known series, "Food Chain" (2000), it's eat or be eaten--or, as Bertolt Brecht and others have put it: we are what we eat.

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FOTO: NEW PHOTOGRAPHY FROM DENMARK

SCANDINAVIA HOUSE

NEW YORK CITY 

SEPTEMBER 20-NOVEMBER 11, 2006

For those who did not make it to Odense, there was an opportunity to sample the smorgasbord of contemporary Danish photography in New York City. Long in the shadow of its Nordic neighbors (Sweden and especially Finland), Denmark's presence in the field of photography has been most noticeable in the realm of photojournalism and documentary photography through students of the legendary Danish School of Journalism in Aarhus. However, there is also a crop of interesting photographers who explore the reaches of the medium.

The best known of Denmark's documentary photographers, Henrik Saxgren, exhibited a set of reportage photos from Egypt and Iraq. Younger photographers such as Charlotte Haslund-Christensen took on modernity with "Jump" (2005), a flow of images from contemporary cities depicting youth culture that played across a plasma screen. Torben Eskerod continues his ongoing series of death-related imagery with a new body of work on memorial photography, depicting Italian tombstones. These images of the dead are themselves decaying, reflecting the passage of time and the literal fading of (photographic) memories. Works by Trine Sondergaard explore the lives of prostitutes living and working near Copenhagen's central train station. Camilla Holmgren examines situational eroticism in a series of self-portraits in domestic settings. Curiously, there was little work from the new school of polymer photogravure that made such an impression at Houston's FotoFest in 1998.

This, of course, points to the limits of mounting a survey show in a relatively small space. With ninety-two images by twenty-seven photographers, there was really too much and too little to see or to make sense of, except the marked breadth of Danish photography. The show was cut down from a larger exhibition curated by Daniel Strong at the Faulconer Gallery of Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa. Fortunately, the show is accompanied by an informative 206-page catalog, Scandinavian Photography 2: Denmark (2005), which places Danish photography in context both artistically and historically.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON OFT CONTACT FINN THRANE AT THE MUSEET FOR FOTOKUNST: WWW.BRANDTS.DK/FOTO, [e-mail].

BILL KOUWENHOVEN is a writer and photographer currently living and working in Berlin and New York City.