UNESCO architecture

 

An open-air exhibition of photographs on Kongens Nytorv in Copenhagen.

This is one of the events in the city to mark that, in 2023, Copenhagen is the UNESCO World Capital of of Architecture.

These are photographs, with information panels and maps, of World Heritage Sites in Denmark …… Roskilde Cathedral, Kronborg Castle, Stevns Klint, Jelling Monuments, Christiansfeld, the Wadden Sea and the Parforce hunting landscape in North Zealand.

UNESCO ARCHITECTURE
Kongens Nytorv
København K
1 July 2023 - 30 July 2023

Fang din by / Capture your city 2023

Fang din by is an annual photographic exhibition that follows an open competition.

This year, over 5,000 photographs were submitted and the exhibition shows 56 photographs that were selected by a jury and including the three winners of the main competition and the three winners of the competition open to schools.

This year the theme was “Without filter” and was an attempt to move photographers away from the picturesque subjects of cities and towns to look at less obviously beautiful and more raw subjects.

The exhibition is now on the square in front of the Danish Architecture Center but can also be seen in Køge, Kolding, Aalborg and Aarhus.

Dansk Arkitektur Center / Danish Architecture Center
Fang din by / Capture your city
Bryghuspladsen, København
9 June - 18 October 2023

Copenhagen Photo Festival 2023

 

Today is the grand opening of the 13th Copenhagen Photo Festival. The "overarching theme is rewilding" and the festival is dedicated to the UN's 17 sustainable development goals.

The events are centred on Beddingen, the festival park on Refshaleøen, with 13 separate exhibitions, both inside and outside, in the old ship-building yards but there will also be exhibitions, workshops, talks and screenings around the city with major exhibitions on public spaces including Fang din By at Bryghuspladsen and exhibitions on Højbro Plads and Bertel Thorvaldsens Plads.

There are six major solo shows with the works of Nanna Heitmann, Craig Ames, Erik Berglin, Daniel Hinks, Hilla Kurki and Kristina Knipe.

On Sunday 4 June, in partnership with the festival, there will be a photo book market and talks throughout the day at GL STRAND

Copenhagen Photo Festival
Festival Office Villa Kultur
Krausevej 3
2100 København Ø

Programme
1 June - 11 June 2023 

Fang din by - Uden filter / Capture you city - without filter
9 June - 18 October 2023

FANG DIN BY / Capture Your City 2022

In collaboration with the Copenhagen Photo Festival, Fang din By - Capture Your City -  is an annual photographic competition and exhibition at the Danish Architecture Center that is now in it's seventh year.

Over 5,300 photographs were submitted and the 56 images for the exhibition were selected by a jury that included the photographer Helena Christensen; the novelist and illustrator Maren Uthaug; the CEO of Copenhagen Photo Festival, Maja Dyrehauge; the photographer, Anders Hjerning and, from the Danish Architecture Center, Tanya Lindkvist.

The theme for the competition this year was Soul of the City and photographers were asked to show "how architecture forms the framework of the lived life."

The winner of the open competition was Tanja Zhigalova with a striking photograph of a woman sitting on the steps of Vor Frue Kirke in the shadow of one of the bronze statues on the west front.

There was a separate competition for schools and first place was awarded to Kaya Lund Jørum who is a pupil at Stokkebækskolen.

Fang din by is at the Danish Architecture Center
on Bryghuspladsen in Copenhagen
from 9 June to 2 October 2022

the photographs will also be shown at other venues including:
Allinge, Bornholm - 9 June to 31 June 2022
Dokk1, Aahus - 1 July to 30 July 2022
Sønderborg library - 1 August to 31 August 2022
Ringe library, Faaborg - 1 September to 2 October

the photograph by Tanja Zhigalova

Copenhagen - capital of architecture

 

Whenever possible, I walk and it’s not often that I go out without a camera. It’s possible that I have walked past some of these buildings hundreds of times but the light changes through the day and over the seasons and there is always something new to see or something to understand or to photograph in a different way or from a different angle because it is seen in a different context.

Copenhagen is an amazing city - a rich and diverse built environment that is to be UNESCO Capital of Architecture in 2023.

select any image to open in a full-screen slide show

 

Copenhagen - Capital of Architecture

 

I have to admit that I probably spend too much time talking about planning in the city and too much time getting angry about bad buildings or inappropriate developments so this is a way to reconnect … a way to celebrate the amazing quality and the amazing variety of the buildings in the city - old and modern - and to encourage people to look around and to look up because this is a city that has amazing buildings of all shapes and materials and forms and styles.

select any image to open in a full-screen slide show

 

Naturens Resonans … works by Søren Rønholt and Gurli Elbækgaard

An exhibition of works in the landscape by the photographer Søren Rønholt and unique ceramic works by Gurli Elbækgaard.

Naturens Resonans
Danske Kunsthåndværkers & Designere
Officinet, Bredgade 66, København
the exhibition continues until 20 September 2020

Søren Rønholt
Gurli Elbækgaard

 

Fang din by / Capture Your City 2020

Fang din by / Capture Your City - an annual photographic competition and exhibition - opened on 25 June on the square in front of the Danish Architecture Center and will continue here until 7 October 2020.

The theme set for this year was everyday magic with the photographers looking at the buildings and landscape of the city as it frames our lives.

As always, a large number of photographers from all over the country submitted their work and this exhibition, selected by a jury, shows 55 of the photographs with three winners selected from the open competition and the three selected from the separate competition for schools.

Fang din by, Dansk Arkitektur Center,
Bryghuspladsen 10, Copenhagen
continues until 7 October 2020

Flanøren / the flaneur

The new Museum of Copenhagen in Stormgade opened in February and has separate galleries or rooms for each of the distinct periods that together make the city what it has become …. the periods of construction and expansion that, together, explain the stages through which the city developed.

Space in the museum is good but certainly not limitless so objects from the collection in the different displays have been selected with care because they have to explain their part in a clear but sometimes fragmented story about important events and different periods of growth and of change. 

In one of the upper rooms there is a display about the city in the late 19th century with a large model of the new city hall at the centre … a building that was finished around 1905. This was the period after the ramparts and the gates of the old city were dismantled, so it was a period when the city began to expand outwards and the number of people living here increased rapidly. It was also a period of amazing developments in technology and in manufacturing … a period when trams appeared in the city and telephones and flushing toilets … a period when their lifestyle then seems familiar and not actually that different from our own lives now.

This particular part of the story of Copenhagen has been told by focusing on eight types or characters or professions from that period. People who have been chosen to represent the ways in which life was changing.

They include the Tram conductor; the Kiosk attendant; the Architect and the Engineer … so that's two jobs that were new in the city and two increasingly-important professions. There is also the part of the story of life in the city that is told through The Child because so many schools were built in this period and it was when education became available for more people and changed more and more lives. There is Cyclisten - or the cyclist - representing both new popular transport but also to show that this was a period with more leisure time for more people, and there is Kanonfotografen or the street photographer and Flanøren.

 

 

For fairly obvious reasons the last two - Kanonfotografen and Flanøren - were of particular interest ………

By profession I'm an architectural historian and a social historian but, throughout my career, looking at photographs and taking photographs have been essential parts of my work … so, taking photographs as a record; using historic photographs as important and reliable evidence that document change and using carefully-selected photographs to get across information in books and exhibitions and lectures. But I would not describe myself as a street photographer even though now I spend much of my time in the street taking photographs.

There are two types of street photographer covered by that broad term:

The first - and the focus in the museum in the gallery about the late 19th century - could be described as commercial photographers who took their studio to their customers and often, but not always, with a mobile dark room. They were taking pictures of people in the street who wanted their photographs taken - or were persuaded by the photographer that they wanted to have their picture taken. Street photographers produced the outdoor version of the studio portrait.

Until I saw the camera in the museum, and the background information with it, I had not understood just how quickly street photographers became common in the city or just how popular they were right through to the 1960s. There is one view of the square in front of the city hall that appears to show at least three cameras set up so trade must have been good and clearly, for many visitors, part of a good day out in Copenhagen was to have a photo taken.

Presumably, some of these photographers moved across to using polaroid cameras but as these became cheaper, and people could afford their own Polaroid camera to take their own instant pictures, and then, as Polaroid cameras were, in turn, replaced by cheaper and cheaper digital cameras and then phone cameras, these street photographers disappeared.

Of course, where they have resurfaced is with the photographers who work the fashionable streets of cities like New York or London or Milan and take pictures of people on the street because of their clothes or their style and then post the images to Instagram …. but that’s another story.

The second type of street photographer in Copenhagen were the photographers who photographed the streets and of the buildings and of life on the streets in the city and their works can be seen throughout the museum.

Some were taking photographs of the new streets and new buildings or of the historic buildings for books or for magazines or to sell as prints or for popular postcards and major events in the city were photographed - particularly for newspapers. Some photographers where taking photographs to document and to reveal social situations or social interactions and would now be described as a photo journalist rather than as a street photographer.

One of the first and perhaps the greatest of the early photographers to record everyday and more mundane aspects of life in a city was the French photographer Eugène Atget, who, working in Paris, took photographs of unlikely subjects like alleyways or shop windows or piles of old clothes in second-hand shops. There were also major American photographers like Paul Strand and then Walker Evans, who recorded the reality of the life of the poor. They would not have described themselves as street photographers but that was where they worked.

The Danish photographer Jacob Riis was actually eight years older than Atget. Initially, he was a journalist but then became a photographer and is now described as a documentary photographer. Riis emigrated to New York when he was just 21 and worked there rather than in Denmark so I am not sure how much his work influenced photographers working here but certainly there are amazing photographs in the city archive that record the slums and the alleys of the city that have long gone so photographers in Copenhagen were not simply interested in polite and middle-class subjects.

Kongens Nytorv ….
photographs taken around 1900

above all,
these photographs show just
how much space
cars need and take

the photographs
are from the City Archive

 

street camera
in the Museum of Copenhagen

 

not all the old photographs of Copenhagen are of the affluent streets and squares - this is Adelgade where the old house were deemed to be slums and were demolished in the 1950s

At first I was perplexed by that word Flanøren until I read the information panel where it explained that it comes from the French flâneur … a word translated as loafer if you want to be rude or, in some dictionaries a flâneur is defined as “an elegant idler” which is marginally more polite but not much more.

And they were mostly young men that you see in the photographs. Apparently, they had also called themselves Boulevardiers so obviously they strolled backwards and forwards along the fashionable streets and through the squares of Copenhagen seeing and being seen. It is fascinating that this was clearly a time when anything French had to be good …. from the boulevards to the mansard roof.

I realised that I spend much of my time walking up and down the streets of Copenhagen to take photographs but I don't think anyone would call me elegant - idler maybe - but elegant no unless it was with irony. 

Kongens Nytorv by Paul Fischer

 
 

Both the paintings and the photographs by the Danish artist Paul Fischer - he took photographs as a first stage for composing his paintings - show how the public space of the streets and the squares then played an important part in everyday life in Copenhagen and, significantly, well over a century later, the way that people in the city use the public space of the streets and the squares continues in much the same way.

Walk along Sønder Boulevard - particularly on a Friday evening after work or on a sunny Sunday afternoon - and you'd probably assume that the large number of people sitting outside and the number of children playing and the number of people using the sports courts or exercise equipment there must all be part of a relatively recent Copenhagen - a Copenhagen with much more leisure time - but, actually, using public space for exercise and for socialising has a strong and well-established history.

Copenhagen was tightly constricted by the city ramparts and even in the 16th century it must have felt crowded …. after all, the first deliberate expansion of the city was with the building of Christianshavn in the early 17th century.

Certainly through the 18th century and the 19th century, it must have felt as if everyone was living on top of each other. Through to the 1860s, when the ramparts and gates were dismantled, houses and people were tightly packed together. Over the centuries, because the city could not expand out beyond the defences, garden plots and courtyards were built over and if you look at older houses that survived the numerous fires then you can see that most started with two floors or two main floors with basements and attics but over the years nearly all of them had extra floors added so they were enlarged to three and then four and finally five floors of apartments. And, as now, if an old and low house was demolished then what replaced it was inevitably taller.

Even after the ramparts were removed and the city was able to breath … imagine taking off a tight corset after three centuries … it was not the end of densely packed housing. The new districts of Nørrebro and Vesterbro were built outside the ramparts but both areas had and still have some of the most densely-packed areas of housing in Europe. That's one reason why the public space of Sønder Boulevard, running across the south side of Vesterbro, is now so important for the people who live in the area.

It is hardly surprising that people in the city took over the streets and the squares and the wide roads immediately inside the ramparts and walked on the broad path on top of the ramparts as places to exercise and socialise. The King's Garden was opened to the public in the late 18th century and citizens have been using it ever since. Families stroll through the cemeteries in the city at weekends and there are traditions for taking the first walk in the Spring around the ramparts of Kastellet or taking a Sunday walk along Langelinie to look out across the Sound. Even Tivoli seems to be as much about walking and talking and sitting and drinking as it is about rides and thrills.

If Coronavirus has proved one thing it's that it's hard to keep Copenhagen indoors.

Paul Fischer (1860-1934)
self portrait (above) and
one of his photographs of
Kongens Nytorv in the snow

Fischer did not paint the gritty reality of life in Copenhagen around 1900 but, generally, the life of the middle classes although there are studies of flower sellers and market traders

 

Autumn is here

 

With Kulturnatten this Friday, it feels as if we are definitely into Autumn.

There are still a lot of tourists here but there is a marked change as outdoor tables at cafes and restaurants are packed away or blankets and heaters are brought out but, if you find a spot in the sun, then it’s still pleasant to sit outside for a morning coffee.

The leaves are beginning to change but it will be a week or perhaps more before the parks in the city and the forests out at Klampenborg and Charlottenlund take on their full Autumn colours.

For me, the light at this time of year shows the city at it’s best. There can often be clear bright, deep blue skies and, with the sun now lower in the sky, even in the middle of the day, the shadows are rich and heavy so architecture and sculpture around the city looks fantastic for photographs. Of course, evenings arrive earlier and earlier but in that transition from late afternoon to early evening the light over the water of the harbour and the lakes is amazing and even rain can mean striking dark grey skies.

 
 

where do all the tourists go?

Over the last year or so, I have detected a change of attitude about tourism in the city. 

Tourists and visitors to the city, coming for business or for conferences and events, are still an important source of revenue - many in the city are employed in holiday industries, in the hotels, in restaurants and of course shops rely, to some extent, on tourists shopping - but there have been articles in newspapers recently that have stared to question the benefits of tourism and look at the benefits weighed against the cost. 

Pressures from the numbers of tourists visiting Copenhagen are not yet as marked as the more obvious and better publicised problems in cities like Amsterdam, Barcelona or Venice but certainly people have started to question the impact from Airbnb - particularly where complete apartments are now let through much of the year so this has begun to distort the long-term rental market - and some journalists have asked questions about the number of large cruise ships that stop here and about the impact they have through pollution. But the main criticism is that disproportionate numbers of visitors in the city focus their time on remarkably few sites so crowds of tourists are concentrated in areas like Strøget - the Walking Street - Nyhavn, parts of Christianshavn and along the harbour around the Little Mermaid and these parts of the city can be unpleasantly crowded, not just for local people but actually for visitors as well.

There is also a problem with tour buses that want to drop passengers close to main sites but then park waiting for their passengers to return either blocking the bus stops for public transport or by blocking the front of buildings the visitors actually want to see. Recently, I wanted to take a photograph of the front of the Royal Theatre on Kongens Nytorv for a post here but over three days there were at least two tourist buses parked across the front each time I went past.

 

By coincidence, thinking about this post, I came across a fascinating article on line by Colin Marshall on the Open Culture site from June of this year. He wrote there about 136 maps of major cities across the world produced for a project called Locals and Tourists and published in a larger project The Geotaggers’ World Atlas, by Eric Fisher who has used MapBox, Twitter and data from Gnip to plot photographs taken of cities that have been uploaded to the internet. 

The central area of the Copenhagen map is reproduced here with red indicating photographs that appear to have been taken by tourists while blue are images that are probably by local people - determined primarily because they are Tweeting from the same location for at least a month - and yellow could be either.

When data is presented in this way, it is easy to see the densely-packed areas where most photographs were taken with Nyhavn - the long rectangle at the centre of the map that extends up to large blob that marks Kongens Nytorv - the large public square at the city end of the New Harbour - and just above that there is the distinct shape of the royal palace with the circle of the main square and long narrow strips running out to the right to the harbour in one direction and to the Marble Church in the other. The large public square in front of city hall and, nearby, Tivoli are the densely-packed but slightly more scattered areas of red on the left side of the city centre.

Roads can be picked out clearly and give a framework for location and one interesting feature of the complete map, right, that shows the wider area around the city, is the long narrow line of yellow that is the railway bridge across to Malmö with good and photogenic views of the sound.

The data was collected in 2013 but more recent published data from 2017 corroborates the general conclusions. In that year, there were around 7 million visitors to the city and more than 60% included Nyhavn in their trip so, by rough calculation, that suggests that the number of visitors walking up and down Nyhavn in a year was equal, approximately, to the total population of the country.

With the opening of a new bridge from the end of Nyhavn for cyclists and pedestrians to cross the harbour to Christianshavn, Nyhavn has become not just a destination but also a major route. Shops close to the harbour on the west side of Nyhavn have seen a marked and welcome increase in business and for several shops it has meant the difference between declining trade and the possibility of a failing business before the bridge opened and surviving now.

But an article in Politiken by Søren Astrup in September 2017 pointed out that, even at that early stage, not long after the bridge opened, there was an obvious problem with the possibility for accidents as tourists, looking at maps or at the view or busy chatting came into contact with fast moving bike traffic. Planners are responsible for road markings and barriers and some changes have been made, particularly at the bottom of the bridge on the city side, but tourists also have a responsibility and have to learn to be more aware.

This is particularly true of the green man system at traffic lights that in too many cities seem to be treated as respect-it-or-ingnore-it advice rather than as an instruction but, because biking is taken seriously here, many cyclists are heading to or from work, can be in a hurry, and many cycle long distances so when you get up momentum (speed) you do not appreciate a tourist sauntering into the bike lane to take a better photo or stepping out onto a crossing because it sounds clear …. ie they can’t hear a car so step out without looking.

The real problem in Nyhavn is people taking photographs and particularly selfies. Most tourists would say well that is pretty harmless and surely it doesn’t hurt locals to wait just a few seconds while they get that perfect shot. 

But I’m much less tolerant of selfies now I have actually moved to an apartment on Nyhavn.

I have deliberately changed my behaviour to walk down the shady side when possible, although I live on the sunny side, simply because there are slightly less people taking photos. It may be your once in a life time shot but for me, heading to the metro, it may well be the ninth or tenth time I’ve had to walk out into the road in just over 100 metres to get around a selfish-selfie taker. 

Do people taking selfies realise just how much space they take up on a narrow or crowded path with or without a selfie stick? 

 

A few weeks back I was heading up towards Kongens Nytorv on the Charlottenborg side and walking along the pavement against the water. I noticed a woman standing a short distance ahead with her back against the buildings and only noticed her because of the odd pose - even for someone taking a photo with a phone. The phone was held in both hands at arms length with her arms straight out in front so I guess she was long sighted. As I got nearer and, presumably, as she focused on the phone screen or composed the view, she set off straight across the bike lane - cutting between bikes heading out of the city without looking - and walked straight across the road between the moving cars and straight across the bike lane on the water side with bikes heading fast into the city but without taking her eyes off the screen and ended up, with arms still straight out, rigid, taking up the full width of the pavement immediately in front of me. And I mean immediately in front. Inches away rather than feet away. I was walking quite quickly but she moved at a surprising speed so if I had been wearing rubber-sole shoes there would have been black burn marks on the pavement because I had to stop that quickly to stop from walking straight into her. She gave me a withering look - presumably for standing too close and for distracting her - before turning her head back to the outstretched phone and to the perfect photo she wanted to take. I had to step out into the bike lane - after checking - to get round her. 

When I’m trying to get somewhere it’s bloody annoying although looking out of my apartment it’s more entertaining and a mind-boggling view of weird human behaviour. In the last couple of weeks alone I watched someone who looked like a Japanese tourist who set up his camera on the top of his case with wheels and then made endless trips between the edge of the harbour and his case to take shot after shot after shot until he got just the right angle of his face against the buildings opposite and there was a curious girl who did the splits along the raised timber that marks the edge of the quay for her photo although now, I appreciate, that the timber is, remarkably, like the bar in women’s gymnastics although balancing three metres above the water seemed a little precarious even if, admittedly, it made for an unusual photo. There was also a young couple I took to be Chinese with him in a smart suit and her in an elaborate wedding dress …. Cinderella before midnight meets Marie Antoinette … although they were not strictly taking selfies as they had a photographer with them and she insisted in setting up her camera on a tripod in the middle of the road - again to get what they thought was the perfect photo. 

Another trend I’ve spotted is the fake selfie … the girl (usually a girl and usually mid teens) with a striking outfit and a mate or sometimes someone who is obviously the doting mum there to take the perfect shot. The common pose seems to start by dropping the head forward and then doing a great swinging arc to take all the hair in a great circular sweep so it ends up artfully draped down one side of the face but clear of the eyes and the favourite stance seems to be with body angled to face one side or the other, so across the view line from the camera, but looking slightly over the shoulder towards the camera. Again I’m amazed just how many takes and how much discussion it takes to get that perfect spontaneous shot.

 

Oh and while I’m being grumpy …. the other thing I really really don’t understand is this fad for fixing padlocks to bridges. The first person to do it was being original and presumably romantic if that first lock on that first bridge marked somewhere special where something significant happened … like proposing or promising eternal love and devotion. Now it’s locks on locks on locks.

I’m curious …. do people arrive with pockets full of locks or do they buy them here and exactly how much does it cost the city or the port authority to cut them off at increasingly regular intervals? And what do people do with all those keys?

 

Servitudes - Jesper Just at Kunsthal Charlottenborg

Servitudes, a video installation by the Danish artist Jesper Just, has opened at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen.

The architecture of the gallery space plays a strong part in framing or containing a series of eight videos, including one projected onto the floor, and all are synchronised and seen on a proscribed route along a raised metal walkway with a series of ramps that are reminiscent of temporary access ramps for wheelchairs. These take the visitor through the series of large but dimly-lit spaces and rise high enough to mean that at one point it is necessary to duck down to get under a doorway that normally forms a high and wide link between gallery spaces.

Each film is on a continuous loop and dominate your view point so distort any real sense of scale or time and most visitors seemed to watch each film through so another and strong element of the exhibition is the groups of people seen as silhouettes leaning against the rails of the walkways or, in one gallery, sitting on a bank of platforms.

The videos too have a strong architectural theme and were filmed at One World Trade Center. One has a series of lift doors in a large lobby that are opening and closing to no discernible pattern but with no one entering or leaving and one film has a young woman in a barely-furnished space looking out through high plate-glass windows at a landscape of the city skyscrapers. In another, the camera pans slowly across a finely-detailed glass and steel façade broken by rhythmic tapping that eventually resolves into a young girl, back to the camera. striking a panel at street level with a stone.

The catalogue rightly describes the exhibition as mesmerising.

Servitudes, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen
the exhibition continues until 11 August 2019

Bag on Året, København 2018 /  Behind the Year, Copenhagen 2018

Blankt Papir Press was founded in 2017 by the art photographer Julia Mejnertsen and is  described as a nano-publishing house.

Through 2018 they collaborated with 80 Copenhagen-based photographers to produce images of the city and it's citizens that were published as 12 books - one for each month - with a limited run of 100 for each.

The premise was that "Copenhagen has been named as 'the most liveable city in the world' several times and we have seen many beautiful vistas of the Danish capital, but reality is always far more complex."

The photographs were shown at the Machine Hall through the Copenhagen Photo Festival as a series of booklets … each the work of one photograph and with the works arranged by the month to which they contributed.

Blankt Papir Press

Copenhagen Photo Festival - Festival Center Refshaleøen

 

For the Copenhagen Photo Festival, the centre is over on Reshaleøen at the north end of the harbour - out beyond Christianshavn and Holmen - on the site of former shipyards.

Many of the workshops, office buildings and dry docks of the yards survive in various states but the area has seen a rapid transformation over the last couple of years with new restaurants, the food market of Reffen - now here for its second summer - a bakery and flea market along with a major new gallery of modern art - Copenhagen Contemporary - now also in it's second season.

The photo festival is spread over three main venues and each with a very different character as exhibition space.

At the north end is a group of stacked shipping containers with open ends where the works of Franziska Gill and Marco Marzocchi are shown and outside, on scrub land with the footings of demolished buildings, are the photographs of White Rage by Espen Rasmussen and the large images for Living Room by Jana Sophia Nolle.

All these works are essentially photo journalism and all gain from the temporary and therefore immediate feel of the spaces where a more traditional and polite modern gallery could make the images appear detached from the subjects. In particular, the images of White Rage seem even more of a challenge when seen outside against trees and rough grass as if they are in a post-conflict site of destruction.

To the south, close to the food market, the Machine Workshop is a huge space that provides the venue for Censored - the main open show for fine art photography - the exhibition Hail by Garrett O Hansen; a video installation - KOMA RETREAT - by Mathias Løvgreen and the installation Behind the Year by the independent publisher Blankt Papir Press.

The space above Copenhagen Contemporary with photographs by Mary Frey could not be more of a contrast. It's a vast and light space with an amazing roof and all recently restored. These enormous halls will be used by Copenhagen Contemporary for work with schools and for additional exhibitions beyond or rather above the space of the vast galleries below. For the Photo Festival access was by a relatively narrow metal staircase with a straight single flight that seemed to go on and on climbing for ever - almost surreal.

Copenhagen Photo Festival continues until 16 June 2019

 

Refshaleøen as a venue for the Copenhagen Photo Festival

Although there are exhibitions all over the city, Refshaleøen is the centre for the Copenhagen Photo Festival.

The area - with huge but abandoned buildings from the shipyards here until the 1990s - has an incredible atmosphere - part dereliction and decay and part alive with energy as the area is being transformed.

It's definitely photogenic with amazing materials, colours and texture and with strong contrasts between areas of decay hard against buildings and areas being given a new life.

But there is an odd disjunction ….

The area has become a playground for the city. Of course that's not in itself a bad thing because Copenhagen needs somewhere where people can make a noise - the heavy metal festival Copenhell is out here at the end of the month - or make a mess and it's somewhere artists and makers and young start-up companies can find work space with low or relatively low rents for now in this interim period before developers and money men move in and they are driven out. The area feels consciously edgy but maybe slightly hyper because everyone knows the clock is ticking.

There are actually expensive places here to eat and drink alongside a huge variety of foods from the food market … and I'm not knocking any of that … I'm as middle class as you can get and come out here to Lille Bakery to buy some of the best bread in the city … but ……

And this is where my inner puritan kicks in …Refshaleøen was a huge and, for the post-war Danish economy, a crucial industrial site where thousands of men worked and worked hard and the memory of that is fading and disappearing. Machinery, hoists, cranes have all gone with little remaining to tell you what was done and where.

I'm not romanticising work that must, for many, have been hard and grim. It's just that it is now 30 years since ships were made here so there must be fewer and fewer people alive who actually worked in the yards. Should people now still try to understand all that and remember? Do we need to understand how we got here to make sense of where we are going?

If you stopped any of the foreign students arriving in droves on their bikes or any of the tourists off the ferry and asked them then very few would even know that this part of the city had been a shipyard. Does that matter?

My first trips to Copenhagen were after the ship yards closed, so I have no first-hand idea of what this area was like through the 1950s and 1960s, except from looking at old photos and maps  and maybe that is the other odd thing that few visitors will understand … this land was claimed from the sea, became a major industrial area and failed and dismantled and abandoned in just three decades. In an age when we are more and more concerned about our impact on our planet, is Refshaleøen a stark example of man moving in, transforming a landscape and moving on leaving the mess … so a monument to hubris … or a lesson in pragmatism … our ability to salvage and make something new once the old is no longer of use?

And if I missed the shipyards, I do remember the area before gentrification began … exploring and taking odd photographs of scrap yards and wire fences and vicious guard dogs and feeling uneasy, knowing I was intruding, and waiting to be challenged or seen off at any moment.

Again I'm not romanticising that in any way but maybe cities need scruffy land on the edge of regulations and outside planning and controls although, I guess, that is not on the agenda of the politicians and developers.

 

previous posts:

Status:19 - Dansk Journalistforbund - Exhibition Bus Højbroplads

Part of the Copenhagen Photo Festival, this is an exhibition of 100 photographs by professional photographers shown as digital images on a mobile exhibition venue - the PIXLBOX or exhibition bus from PIXLART.

More than 2500 images were submitted by photographers who are members of DJ: Fotograferne … a section of Dansk Journalistforbund or the Danish Union of Journalists … and reflect a broad range of photographic work from commercial photography through portrait work, art photography and photo journalism.

The photographs were selected within an overall framework of five themes …

  • portrait

  • commercial

  • communication

  • art

  • journalism

 In the exhibition bus the images are digital, shown on a number of screens of different sizes and set portrait and landscape, and several images were shown cropped on more than one screen so there was an interesting opportunity to see how the message or story from an image changes with editing.

Shown on large, high-resolution screens the images have an intensity and depth that is rarely there on the printed page … just compare the images in the exhibition with those in the printed catalogue. That is not a criticism but simply the reality of keeping down the cost of printing the catalogue but then it becomes simply an aide memoir.

The large digital images showed strong vibrant colour where appropriate; the smallest detail in high resolution images and the nuances of soft light in the portrait by Søren Bidstrup of Lars Von Trier in a misty autumn landscape in a river valley.

The images scrolled through so there were often fascinating juxtapositions of images that established a momentary dialogue from the contrast. At one point an informal but still formal portrait by Niels Hougaard of HKH Prince Joachim, second son of the Danish monarch, in military uniform, was set, for a few seconds, next to an image by Rasmus Flindt Pedersen of a street in Mosul as people dealt with the bloody and grim reality of war.

It is a good exhibition space that is restricted but that actually means you focus on the image directly in front of you and the space is designed to have some seating to watch all the images on each screen scroll through and, above all, it is designed to bring art to streets and public spaces anywhere where people do not have easy or direct access to art. 

Many - on fact most - of the images are about context and back story - about why or what might or what probably happened next. Many capture just how weird life can be.

 

this exhibition was shown first through May in Viborg.
Status 19 in the exhibition bus is on Højbroplads from 6 June to 11 June 11-19

 

COPENHAGEN PHOTO FESTIVAL
DJ: Photographers - Status 19
PIXLART
PIXLBOX

 

Fang din by - forandring / Capture your city - change 2019

 

Fang din by - catch or capture your city - is an annual photographic competition at Dansk Arkitektur Centre - the Danish Architecture Centre or DAC - that demonstrates “that our cities are full of quirky details, historical corners, new urban spaces and fantastic architecture.”

This year the theme of the exhibition is transition in the city because our cities are changing every day and that change is fast. "We adapt to climate change, building height, the old is torn down creating new urban spaces." Information about the competition posed two questions ….

How does it look when old meets new? 
Is the transformation of our cities always good? 

Along with information about submission of images for the competition were also the recommendations that photographs should not only reflect the theme for this year but should also be an "exciting composition" and show the "interaction between urban space and people.

The competition was open to professional and amateur photographers and this year 3,000 people submitted images.

A final selection was made by a jury with Maja Dyrehauge Gregersen, Director of Copenhagen Photo Festival; the photo journalist Janus Engel Rasmussen, and Christian Juul Wendell, Head of Communications at the Institut for (X) and project manager at Bureau Detours.

The overall winner was announced at the opening with the second and third prize and there was a second and separate competition for schools and again the winner and second and third prizes were announced.

Fang din by was organised in collaboration with the Copenhagen Photo Festival and the opening coincided with the opening of the Festival.

the exhibition can be seen outside on Bryghuspladsen in Copenhagen
- the public square in front of BLOX -
from 7 June through to 30 August

for the first time this year there will also be a separate but closely-related exhibition - showing a different selection of images - that will be moved between a number of venues around the city.

That exhibition can be seen at:

  • Nytorv - 7 June to 20 June

  • Israels Plads - 21 June to 4 July

  • Rådhuspladsen - 5 July to 18 July

  • Kultorvet - 19 July to 1 August

  • Den Røde Plads - 2 August to 15 August

  • Højbro Plads - 16 August to 30 August

  

Dansk Arkitektur Centre - Fang din by
Copenhagen Photo Festival
Bureau Detours
Institut for (X)

Fang din by - Bryghuspladsen

 

Fang din by - Nytorv

Bauhaus #itsalldesign

Designmuseum Danmark, Bredgade 68, Copenhagen

A major exhibition has opened at Designmuseum Danmark on the history, the staff and their teaching and the work of the Bauhaus school of architecture and design.

This reassessment was conceived by Vitra Design Museum and Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn to mark 100 years since the opening of the Bauhaus.

review to follow

the exhibition continues until 1 December 2019
Designmuseum Danmark