Exhibition on view through 15.1 2012.
The photographic image has always told about people and their circumstances. Photography has a unique power to reveal people’s lives and work and to bring human sorrow and joy to life. In the Preus Museum’s collections one finds many stories. This exhibition shows eleven photographers who have their own pictorial languages.
© Lars Tunbjörk Ôland, 1991
Since photography began, the camera has been a means of communication. In the 1840s photo-graphers ventured into the unknown to show those at home what they had never seen: the pyramids of Egypt, wild animals, remote countries like China and India. Everything foreign and strange was photographed. But photographers also recorded industrialism’s progress in their own countries. Pictures were taken of lavish new factories, railroad construction, and new houses resulting from the growth of cities. The Crimean War of the 1860s was the first portrayed with the aid of the camera. X-ray photographs assisted in the development of medicine. Great ingenuity attended explorations of how photography could be used, and that also continues. But the human being was often centermost, as in this exhibition.