It's Mette Sandbye, who is professor of photography studies in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen,
and who this time is also an academic visitor, a research associate of the Department of History of Art.
And we're going to be talking in part during our conversation about what exactly she's doing at Oxford.
But I think before we get to that point Mette, we should talk about how you got to be an art historian at all.
And the first thing that struck me when I was looking at your CV as I was preparing for our conversation was that just like last week's guest,
you too had your first two degrees in comparative literature rather than in art history,
and that it was at the PhD level that you chose to write a PhD on, as it happens,
photography and memory as it's articulated in the work of a group of contemporary artists.
What made you shift to doing a PhD about something visual in particular about something photography?
And did you get that in an art history, under an art history discipline or still in Comparative Literature?
MS: Well, the thing is, the department where I am now,
which is called the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, is a department that hosts both the art history,
literature, musicology, theatre studies
and cultural studies that I studied as my my M.A. I started in literature because I was interested in literature.
But in those days in the eighties, also an advantage was that literature was extremely open to all sorts . You could study,
you know, write about churchyards or Donald Duck or fashion or whatever.
And it was very, you know, related to new theory, whereas maybe at that time,
art history in Copenhagen at least, was a little bit more classical or traditional.
So when I chose my A subject, there was a new programme in my department called Modern Culture, which is an interdisciplinary programme,
something between the British tradition of cultural studies and the more German tradition of Kulturwirtschaft
So I started there and then I started to specialise in photography because I guess I've always I personally had this
interest in photography and then at university I was kind of surprised that there was no place you could study it.
And so suddenly during my M.A., which is two years in Denmark, there was a guest professor called Miles Orvell
I don't know if you heard of his name, an American professor of American studies.
Actually, he had a course on the history of American photography.
So it was basically a course where he showed like hundred slides every week or something and went through the history of American photography.
And I was like superstruck. I thought it was so interesting and so much new material.
And I guess that kind of let me on the way.
So already I wrote my master's thesis on American staged photography, but before that I had written, for instance, on Family of Man exhibition.
So I guess the whole, like, variety, that photography could be so many things caught my attention and inspired me.
And that led me to perceive the idea within something in between modern culture and art history.
One could say. GB: And as I understand it, you have kind of the first I mean,
you were the first Danish photo historian or the first person to study it at that level or something.
MS: Yeah, we were actually a couple or three at the same time doing our Ph.D. in photography at the same time.
But I'm the first and only until now, professor, of photography studies in Denmark, one could say.
So I'm the one who has stuck to photography and specialised in it for so many years now. GB: And since I guess you were a pioneer then,
but have you found as a consequence of your position that there's been a lot of students following in your footsteps?
MS: Yeah, definitely it means something. I got the inspiration from listening to this guy, Miles Orvell the American professor,
I think it's really important that, you know, students can have specialised courses in photography.
So that has definitely increased the interest.
Having said that, I have, as you are, I was head of department for the last eight years,
which means I haven't personally had that much teaching in photography.
But now I'm back on trail and I'm definitely, you know, counting students and making them follow me the next year.
Hope? I hope so. GB: That's another thing that struck me when I was looking across your career,
was that at about the same time that you were writing your PhD, you also began writing art criticism for a Danish newspaper.
And indeed, you've been writing that criticism for twenty seven years now.
I'm just wondering how you balance academic scholarly writing and work with public writing.
Is that a difficult thing to maintain that balance? MS: , I don't think so.
I mean, of course, it is more time consuming.
And sometimes I think, you know, had I used - all the time for the last twenty seven years, I've used on doing these reviews, - had I used them on,
you know, studying more French philosophy or writing more books or whatever, I mean, you'll only have like 24 hours in a in a day.
But but I've come to think or I have always thought, actually, that both sides profit from each other.
And so I guess I have this kind of outreach desire that I've had always. Actually when I finished
my MA studies that is that the last thing I wanted at that time was to enter into university.
I just thought that was the worst thing.
So I worked actually in a theatre doing communication for three or four years before I re-entered university.
And that was at the same time that I actually called this newspaper.
They had a very fabulous cultural editor who specialised in photography,
which very few newspapers do, actually and still, and did at that time.
So he died. And then I, I called the new cultural editor and said, shouldn't I be the one who writes about photography for your newspaper?
And he accepted and, you know, for instance, when I wrote my PhD,
which was about how contemporary artists or artists in the nineties,
nineteen nineties primarily, had kind of renegotiated history through reusing family photographs,
people such as Ilya Kabakov, Sophie Calle
So when I wrote it,
I profited from being an art critic because I was invited to all these museum openings, invited to do interviews with the artists.
sitting next to them at the gallery, opening dinner or something like that were in those days.
I mean, maybe they would never have called a university person to -
'Wouldn't you come and meet so and so because the book sounds good, whatever' But because I was press, I could kind of take advantage from that.
So so in many ways those two things happen to be good for each other.
One could say the end,
at least I've had a much more visible profile in the Danish public because I had this window to the world in the newspaper.
It's a weekly newspaper. It's kind of a little bit more cultural maybe, or slightly more I wouldn't say academic, but, you know,
you can write longer articles with longer sentences in this newspaper.
And also actually, I think it's really nice, you know, it gets you on the toes. I write quickly.
So that's also something which is sometimes, you know, nice for your academic practise that you kind of think and write.
And it can be an advantage and sometimes maybe disadvantage.
GB: So far, despite having this side job, you published 10 books, eight of them in Danish and two in English.
I wonder how again you've reconciled or is there some frustration in having to speak to a local audience that primarily speaks Danish,
but also trying to get your work to a more global audience? How do you match those two things?
MS: Definitely there is. I mean, in my generation when
I wrote my piece in the 90s, nobody wrote in English, actually, we wrote in our own language
I had both my master's dissertation, my PhD dissertation and other books published quickly after.
So I kind of became a name in Scandinavia because as people might know, we can read each other's languages.
So the Swedes and the Norwegians could read my books in Danish.
But now in retrospective,
I really sometimes regret that I didn't take the effort of writing my books in English from the beginning because a lot has changed in Denmark,
the universities have become much more international. The PhD students write much more there dissertations in English.
And so the last, you know, whatever, 10, 15 years or more, I have published a lot of articles in English,
but the book that I'm kind of preparing now, where I have all this time in Oxford, will be in English.
So that will be my first monography in English. GB: Mette,
maybe you could explain so that we can understand what is the relationship between Denmark,
the Nordic countries and Scandinavia. And what advantages and disadvantages are there from you coming from this region of the world?
MS: Wow, that's a big question. I mean, there is a relation in that sense that the cultures are very close to each other.
I mean, it's always like that. When we - I say some of the some academics from the Nordic countries -
if we go to a conference in England or the US or whatever, we feel very much the same and we kind of stick to each other or whatever.
But when we are in our own context, of course,
we feel that there are major differences between us and we can, you know, I could speak a lot about that.
But I mean, it is an advantage that we understand each other's languages except Finnish.
That's another totally other, you know, language group.
So historically there has been a lot of engagement with each other,
but also because we are like the same kind of social democratic welfare societies.
and there are many similarities. GB: you often seem, I mean you personally, often seem to be involved in projects that are Nordic rather than, say, Danish.
MS: Yeah, definitely. And I mean, as I recall, we talked about it the other day, where it was that we met.
But I think it was because actually there was a conference in Denmark where we had the Michel Frizot as a guest speaker.
He was the French scholar who made one of the more recent - well, it's 20 years ago -
Histories of photography which was very acknowledged. And so we invited him to Denmark for a seminar.
And there I met a colleague from Norway secretly and a colleague from Sweden, Stockholm
And we got the idea of making a Nordic network of photography studies in order to first speak to each other and collaborate.
But secondly, also to make, you know, Scandinavian and Nordic photos studies more known in the world.
And we had these annual seminars, we got some funding, and we invited you for one of our seminars.
And that's like more than 20 years. Well, around 20 years ago or something.
And so in that sense, you know, because we are small countries, we could do more if we united.
GB: I gather then that there is sort of monies available to developing Pan-Scandinavian projects like that.
That's kind of an interesting idea that all of the Scandinavian countries, including Finland and Iceland.
You know, become incorporated into this five country combined funding model.
MS: Yes, I mean, of course, sometimes funding, you know, can kind of guide you a little bit on the way of getting ideas of what to do.
I mean, there are lots of examples of, that's the same with some EU programmes where you need to be in three countries or so.
When suddenly someone from Hungary calls you and say, you know, 'we need a partner from from Scandinavia, could you be on board or something'
But in terms of speaking for the Nordic countries,
I think we already have so many things in common that it is kind of strengthening ourselves if we work together.
And that's what we're doing. And that's one of the projects I'm here to research on in Oxford.
This such a collaborative project. GB: We'll come will come to the Oxford thing.
But I want to still talk about your past,
because another pioneering thing that you have done during your career is publish or edit the first history of Danish photography,
which must have been an interesting project in itself. Could you say a little bit about how that project came to that came to fruition?
MS: Well, actually, it was something that was started by another person than me, it was the director of the Museum of Photographic Art,
who started the project and negotiated with a publisher, the largest danish publisher, Gyldendal.
And so he kind of gave me the project to take and continue with it.
So the frame was that it was a one volume history of photography, which should include everything - that's very difficult in one volume.
And the some of the authors were already asked.
So I kind of continued and just maybe broaden the scope a little bit more so that people who contributed,
came from history, literature, studies, art, history, media studies, lots and lots of fields.
And since it was only about a one volume book, the two classical traces, which is documentary and art photography,
but we tried I tried to include as much as you can, all sorts of fashion photography and X-ray photography and other kinds,
a little bit inspired by the form of Michel Frizot's History of photography,
where there are these small inserts, case studies of the first image, X-ray photography or royal portraits, something like that.
GB: The multiple authors was this difficult as the editor to manage.
MS: Oh, it's, I mean, always.
But if you try editing other people's text - I think there are maybe 10 authors or something - this is the last time I'll do that.
But having said that, you know, if you have a tight editing process,
you can get more experiences, more knowledge, you can broaden the scope by having many authors.
So that worked pretty well. As with my own books it is in Danish.
We even tried to persuade, because it was the largest Danish publisher,
it's like a traditional commercial publishing house and they were not at all interested in having it in English, nor just a summary in English.
So that was beyond their interest.
GB: It's kind of impressive, though, that there's enough of a market in Denmark alone to publish what is a relatively lavishly produced book.
MS: Yeah, I mean it's it's has been sold out for many years actually now.
And that's the thing. it came in one edition of - I don't know now how many actually I've forgotten - a couple of thousands.
And it's sold out now and they won't,
because it's really expensive to do in a second edition, it's
very beautifully illustrated and that's expensive to to do a second edition.
GB: But the challenge,
the creative challenge of national histories is how you decide what to include and how you decide what you're going to exclude and was struck that you,
for example, chose to include work by Jacob Riis, a Danish born person who, however,
only made photographs for a very brief time in New York, never made any in Denmark. So what gave you the rationalisation,
why should Jacob Rees appear in the history of Danish photography?
MS: Well, first of all, each side was given a theme and a kind of chronological period, and then they had pretty free hands of what to include.
But secondly, I guess it's maybe typical of that for some small country like Denmark,
when we have at least one who is internationally famous worldwide, then we would call him a Dane.
Like, for instance, you know, one could compare with Olafur Eliasson,
right now, who's one of the world's most famous artists?
And he is like, I think he's more or less permanently living in Berlin.
His parents are from Iceland, but in Denmark, we definitely call him a Danish artist.
And so that's a little bit like Jacob Riiis. We definitely call him a Dane.
And, you know, so he should be in the book.
But having said that, it's very much about photography in Denmark done by Danish photographers.
GB: an you imagine writing a Danish history of photography rather than a history of Danish photography?
The Finns have done it. They've published two histories of Finnish, and to Finnish histories of world photography.
Maybe the next project for you would be writing a Danish history of world photography.
Is it possible? Is it conceivable? MS: I don't know.
I mean, probably, but I haven't really thought about it and I'm not sure
how I should succeed with that. I mean, we'll come back to to my new project.
maybe it could be said that it is a kind of a Nordic thinking behind that project.
GB: One of the things that struck me when reading what you have written about this history of Danish photography, is that,
even at the moment of publication, you called for its parricide, that is, you called on the next generation to kill it off and publish a better one.
I wonder if that's how, when you look back,
you see that the great contribution of this project was precisely just to be the first that's opening the door for others.
MS: Yes. That's that's a major contribution, I would think. But the thing is that until now, there hasn't been another new history of Danish photography.
There has been a history of Danish contemporary art.
I made one myself also where photography is included.
I mean, that's the other story. Should we keep on having this ghetto of photography as itself?
Is is it relevant today to write histories of photography instead of history of contemporary art or contemporary culture or whatever?
And I think it's always the dilemma if you come from a culture where you haven't really described what went on,
then you tend to make the first attempt kind of traditional in a sense,
because I must admit that this first history of Danish photography was in a sense traditional.
We used the same, you know, documentary genres, et cetera, that other international histories of photography have done.
But I guess it's also important just to make visible what happened.
I mean, in the American history of photography, you have the five different volumes.
Then number six can be totally, you know, exploding everything from within and making a totally alternative history.
But I think you need a little bit of a traditional fundament making visible what happened.
But of course, in one volume it's just the tip of the iceberg.
GB: Now, your own contribution to that history was a chapter about what we might call everyday
photography and the different ways in which Danish artists have engaged with them,
particularly since the 1960s and 70s. Why do you think that's an important issue?
And why is the 60s and 70s such an important 10 year period also?
MS: Well, I think in my chapter,
I decided to focus both on kind of avant garde photography and then ordinary people's photography and documentary photography,
all in the same chapter, because I realised that it was a time where, you know, private photography really exploded.
One could say private photography exploded post the invention of the Kodak camera in the 1880s.
And there have been other phases. But the sixties and the early seventies was a major explosive explosion where everyone, children,
women, whatever, could suddenly afford a camera, take colour photographs, it's the instant period,
it's the period of the flashbulb. So there was.
Really an explosion of private photography in the late 60s, early 70s,
and at the same time that kind of photography was taken up by
avant garde artists in some kind of protest against the, you know, expensive paintings, post-war painting, that tradition, etc.
So so especially conceptual artists or also political artists,
most of them like either took their own snapshots and
included them in books and artworks and kind of imitated the work of the amateur.
So there was this mutual collaboration between the amateurs and the most advanced avant garde artists.
I mean, that's not only a Danish thing, but that took place internationally as well.
So I thought that was a really interesting period. And actually in documentary it was well, there was this concern about making something more,
you know, trashy and spontaneous and political at the same time.
So at the same time, when I wrote this chapter, I did a book called Boring Images,
and that was about how artists had kind of imitated or reused, but mostly imitated snapshot photographs in the seventies.
There was a chapter about Wolfgang Tillmans, for instance, also his way of kind of imitating vernacular snapshot photos, et cetera, which led me to
an interest for the last 10 years, that was after I've done this, I was like,
why has so much been written about these, you know, avant garde artists and artists in general working with photography?
And why has so little been written on the real amateur images, the family albums, the family photographs?
And that was like 10 years ago, whereas now there's much more.
But during these 10 years where I've been working with a family photo album,
there has been an explosion in interest in vernacular photography and also inspired by your work of school, of course.
GB: So perhaps you could explain to our audience about snapshot albums -
what is interesting about them, when on the surface, they seem rather banal and ordinary.
Why do you find them so interesting?
MS: I mean, one reason is just that there's this abundance of images. I mean, that's actually the most widespread use of photography, one could say.
So just psychologically, it's interesting to ask: why is it so important for people to take photographs of their daily lives,
collect these images, even though they maybe don't look at them, they just have them in the house or whatever?
So that psychological need to both record the past and what has happened, but also to,
you know, make your create your own identity, your own history, your own self image.
I think that's super interesting psychologically.
And then secondly, it's actually interesting material to look into, because if you regard it as some kind of,
you know, depictions of culture and such broader culture.
So this mixture between the very personal identity making and the representation of cultures is super interesting.
I think you can make a lot you can create histories, write histories from looking into family photo albums.
And then that is the challenge I try to work with these days, particularly from the sixties and seventies and onwards, because that kind of material,
which is our near past, one could say is I mean, I think it's interesting to look at - there's things like, you know, material culture in the period
I brought one album with me. I just saw something like these albums here.
For instance, here you see an image - if you can see it - of someone photographing their new motor bike, that kind of leisure culture.
And then you have a baby stroller. So this idea of photographing the materials around you, your new acquisitions is interesting and how people,
you know, posed. How they relate to each other's bodies.
There's so many things that can be said from albums. It's kind of strange
it hasn't been done more in a sense. GB: Now, I know you've done research in Japan, obviously in Denmark, and now at least a little bit in England.
How are you able to discern? I mean, one of the interesting things about studying things like snapshot albums is we imagine that it's a common medium.
But when you go to different places, have you noticed differences?
Are there cultural differences between the ways in which people use their photographs and particularly how they
articulate them in album form? MS: Definitely there are differences. I'm here in Oxford for a term and
I was a term in Tokyo, in Japan some years ago.
And first of all, I mean, actually doing research on more recent material is a way also to get in touch with people.
I was told that before I came - and I don't speak Japanese -
that the Japanese are very difficult to actually get to talk with and open their homes,
etc. But then having that project made it much more easy to actually get access to people's houses.
And, you know, they were super open to show me. And they have so many albums.
It's incredible. They have very small apartments, but they had really many albums.
And so I did interviews with around 15 families or one member of the family, and they showed me their albums.
And one could say that we live in a global Kodak culture where a lot of family photographs are
the same and albums and also because maybe technology kind of decides how we pose etc.
But having said that, there are many, many differences. For instance, it's much more about Japanese culture.
It's much more about being an individual within a collective I mean, being a part of the collective, a group, for instance.
So I was struck by how many group images there were. And for instance,
it's a common thing to have a photographer if you go to a school trip or even the daily lives in the schools is photographed by photographers.
And then these images can be bought by the parents. And there they go into the albums. For instance, from my own kids, my own history,
I have no images from my school time except those post annual school photographs.
Whereas in these Japanese albums, there were many photos of like one individual in the group in the daily life in the group.
So that was the thing that struck me. GB: Are they organised differently within the album format?
MS: Most of the photos I saw were dedicated to individual children, for instance,
or an individual person that the album was following a person from birth until typically they left home.
That's a form I saw in the U.S. as well. And it's not so common in Denmark, actually.
We have more just the history of the whole family in one album.
So that's the thing.
Also kind of underlining this aspect of, you know, telling the individual child's story within a larger community, within a larger context.
GB: No doubt you've noticed the impact of digital photography and digital social media.
What is that impact. Are people still making albums or is this a thing of the past?
MS: It is a thing of the past, I would say.
I mean, there are these new technologies where you can send in your photographs and
then by email receive a kind of pre-produced or a company commercially produced album.
People do that typically if they have children or small children.
But it's a totally other thing. Now with the photography, it's a much more social thing.
It has always been a thing of communication, which is also a point that I guess with these new digital technologies,
they have made us look back into history and realise aspects that were already there in photography,
for instance, I mean, the whole Roland Barthes take on photography that you have studied yourself a lot.
I still think as you do that it's the most inspiring book on photography, his Camera Lucida.
But that thing about, you know, the past and facing the past, the nostalgia of the past and the 'this has been...' etc...
this approach to photography has dominated for so many years.
Whereas I think when we had digital photography, suddenly we realised that photography is much more about communication,
about communicating, and now, you know, via Instagram or Snapchat sending images.
'Here we are. Oh, hello' from Oxford to to Denmark or whatever.
So it's much more about sharing and communication etc.
Thinking of photography in that way related to
digital photography has also brought attention to what was already there in photography.
GB: But I wonder, you know, you were saying people put together albums, put them in a cupboard, and very rarely actually look at them.
I wonder whether what digital photography has brought to the fore is that we were always be more invested in the
taking than we were in the looking at them. You were talking about the psychological aspect of photographing. It's the
act of photographing that we do anxiously, but the actual recording and organising of photographs is actually a secondary matter.
MS: Yeah, that's probably an important aspect.
But one could say that actually producing an album was an element of, you know, active construction of your own history.
And interestingly enough, many albums include all sorts of other things like, you know, hair locks or little writings or paper clippings.
And so they are scrapbooks in itself, which I think is really interesting.
And the whole materiality of that is one thing that one should look into.
So that is aspect is more or less gone now where people, you know, just keep an endless stream of photographs on their phone or so.
They don't really organise them any anymore. And I mean, personally, I think it's a shame.
But I don't even do it with my own photographs. So, I mean, as historians, we cannot say this is a shame or people should do this and that.
I mean, we need to follow what happens. And so.
GB: Have you found any interesting examples?
I think you were looking in the Bodleian library as a first resource. Does the Bodleian have interesting examples of personal family albums.
MS: They do.
If you're particularly interested in the history of British colonialism and people who went elsewhere and worked as soldiers.
The other day I saw a really interesting album about a nurse who went went to Southern Europe and her personal album.
So those kind of stories, they are full of. But I was particularly looking for a new material and I didn't find any of that.
I found a little bit in Denmark. So what my findings has mostly actually been in flea markets or talking to persons.
So if anyone in the audience has an album from the sixties or the seventies,
a British album that they don't want to want to, you know, that they don't know what to do with.
Then I would be interested. I mean, last year, I heard a radio programme.
We had this radio programme in Denmark where people can, you know, call in with all sorts of dilemmas, personal dilemmas.
And then there was a person who called in and said, you know,
my father died and we had three siblings and he has so many photographs and we don't know what to do with them.
And, you know, my sisters, they want to throw them out.
What should I do? And I have never responded to a radio programme before, but I wrote into this,
you know, 'if you don't keep them, then I would like to have them.'
So they read this announcement and actually the family ended up keeping the photographs.
But there was another woman who called me and said, you know, I have the same problem.
'Would you like to have my father's photographs?' So then that can also be a way to get material.
GB: Wow. Amazing. Now, you mentioned British colonial history, but Denmark has its own colonial history.
And I know that you've written about photographic practises and again, the relationship of artists to photographic practises in Greenland.
Would you say a little bit about that? I mean, is there something distinctive about the history of the culture of Greenland that interests you?
MS: I mean, definitely it's interesting. I'm in a sense, I'm happy that, you know,
the Danish history of photography came out in 2004, so it's many years ago.
And there was actually a whole chapter on the representation of Greenland by Danish photographers.
Mostly there were very few in the first half of the 20th century.
There were one or two Greenlandic photographers and they are included as well.
But we had this chapter in it in a period where actually, I must say, you know,
nobody took an interest in Greenland and Denmark has never considered itself a colonial colonial nation.
And actually, it's only more recently that, you know, we've been discussing these issues.
So I think it's really interesting to look into how particularly the Danes, but also other explorers, such as, you know, Peary,
The other day I was actually at the Bodleian and they have this two volume Robert Peary book from the late ninteen hundreds, called Northward,
Northward Over the Great Ice, I think.
So that's his exploring description of his meeting with the Greenlanders and they included some amazing photographs in them.
Among others a series where explorers, they have names, they are dressed in fur coats.
They're called Clark and Entrekin, et cetera.
And then the photographs of some of the local Inuit women they meet, they are more or less naked and they don't have names.
They are called, you know, mistress of the tupiq, which means tent or arctic bronze, things like that.
So that was a typical representation maybe of the time of the Greenlanders,
which is, of course, important to shed light on in a Danish context as well.
But I found it also interesting, as both an art critic in Denmark,
and a photo historian to look into what is going on right now.
A young photographer is actually one depicting their daily lives,
which are not that different from yours and mine, maybe,
except that you have, you know, icebergs in the background or something, or they are, you know, reworking the colonial past in a critical way.
Some of them do that now. So I've always thought it was, you know, important to follow that story as seen from a Danish perspective as well,
GB: Is there tension between Greenland and Denmark. I mean, is that part of that history or not?
MS: I mean, well, more recently, the whole as in the world as such, the discussion of decolonisation has grown a lot in Greenland more recently.
I mean, they got self-rule in 2009. And so they're still a part of the Danish realm, but they have self-rule.
But the last, I would say four or five years or something, amongst particularly young Greenlanders,
the discussion of becoming even more independent from Denmark has risen a lot.
So it's and, you know, there was a case last year where, first of all, there was the story about Donald Trump coming to Greenland,
wanting to buy Greenland, and that created a huge focus and debate, et cetera, on it.
But at the same time, there was some you know, there's a statue in the central square in Nuuk
the capital, which is a statue of Hans Egede
the Norwegian Danish priest who started the colonisation of Greenland three hundred years ago in 1721.
And they put red paint over him and wrote Decolonised, et cetera.
And actually, this is the three hundred year anniversary of the official colonisation of Greenland.
And the official celebration has been cancelled off by the mayor of Nuuk, the capital.
So lots of arrangements are going on.
But it's not a thing that people celebrate in Greenland anymore.
So there are tensions. But coming with that, there's there's much more interest from Denmark in Greenland these days, maybe because,
on a political level, people feel that, 'OK, we could actually lose Greenland' because it's a way for Denmark to be an important being.
We are invited to Arctic summits, et cetera, because we are with the US, with Russia.
Suddenly we have this important role, which is something that Denmark wants to keep in a sense.
GB: Let me just invite audience members.
If they have questions for Mette, please put them in the chair and read them out when we have a bit of time.
You're in Oxford, you're looking at the family snapshot albums of that sort of material.
But the other interest you have.
The moment is in professional studios run by women, and it's around the turn of the 20th century and something I didn't realise,
but I know you've just given a paper in Zagreb about it, is that many of the
early Danish women photographers were also involved in the suffragette movement.
Could you say something a little bit about the connexion between women running
their own photography studios and their aspirations for political representation,
perhaps? MS: Yeah. I mean, it turns out that this is a Nordic project where we have five scholars from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland and Finland.
And we had this idea initially that it was a specific Nordic culture.
I'm not so sure about that, just now from scratching the surface here in England, but I can come back to that.
But just actually making visible the huge amount of women studio photographers there were in the early the late 19th and early 20th century.
And many of them, they never married.
They only hired women assistants in the studios, some of them - the one I did a paper on in Stockholm -
She was she never married. She never had children. And her studio partner was also a woman photographer.
And they lived together, as you know, in the obituary of one of them.
It said 'her friend', the other one.
So I don't know actually what their relationship was.
But it's a fact that many of them actually also lived with women and they supported all sorts of women's liberation movements.
This one that I've been writing about.
She fought for having more women on the union of photographers, having more women to be educated, but not only in photography, but in you know,
she started a women's reading club in Copenhagen and all these kind of initiatives to empower women,
one could say in a sense, at the same time, she was super commercial and she was, you know, photographing the royal palace.
She became a royal photographer because of that.
And so I think it's really interesting, the culture of something very commercial and at the same time fighting for women's liberation.
And she photographed all the Danish - I mean, we don't call them suffragettes in Denmark - but the same movement.
And she was the central part of fighting for women's right to vote.
That was gained in 1915 in Denmark. So that was before England.
GB: Do you think the photography industry or the photography business was more open to women?
And that's why we find these independent type of women taking it up?
Why is there this particular association between running commercial photography studios and political activism, do you think?
MS: Uh, I mean, all these technological aspects of photography, I guess it was considered a male thing.
And so I don't know.
I think just taking the step to actually become an independent photographer and open your own studio made you think of what you could do,
empower you and then, you know, make you interested in, you know, communicating that knowledge to other women in a sense.
I mean, there are many articles from that period, not only in Scandinavia, but also in England and the US,
where women write articles such as 'this is really a business for for young women to enter'
'and you should' and encouraging them to do that. And so we had that idea that it was a Scandinavian thing.
But looking into the the census, the British and Wales census or the census for England and Wales in that period,
I can see that actually between 30 and 40 percent of the professional photographers in England as well were women.
So that's a whole, you know, culture. That is interesting.
Just to, you know, first of all, to inscribe in the general history of photography,
but actually looking into it as its own field, as a culture, a broader culture.
So we are not trying to, I'm not trying to, you know,
make these photographers, convert them into artists or something, but actually looking around the culture as such.
GB: Yeah. And as I understand it, this is another Nordic project.
I mean, it's you and other scholars in the Nordic region. So how does that work?
MS: Well, it's difficult to collaborate with
five people at the same time. We wanted to write into Nordic chapters with themes and writing together the four of us,
but we have just realised that that's actually too complicated because, you know,
two of them are museum directors and some the rest of us we live and we work in universities.
We have a lot of obligations, teaching,
etc. So we end up probably writing a couple of chapters each from each country and then putting it into one volume.
GB: OK, so is it going to be an effort to say, 'Oh, there's something Nordic about Nordic women's studios' or we're going to say no,
there's a Danish chapter and a Swedish chapter and so on? MS: Yeah, I think we'll do that.
The last thing and I think I mean, initially we had this idea that, as I said, it was a specific Nordic culture, but I don't think it anymore.
I had a talk the other day with a student actually from Oxford,
and she is studying visual culture and women's visual culture around nineteen hundred in Paris and St. Petersburg.
And it was super interesting that, I mean, there was a lot of women photographers in St. Petersburg around nineteen hundred.
I didn't realise that at all. So even though our story is not specific, it's still interesting and worth writing about.
GB: sounds like a fascinating story.
Now, another recent project you've been engaged in is curating an exhibition of Danish contemporary art, is that right?
MS: Yes GB: So tell me is this something you've done in the past, curating? MS: I haven't curated much. A little bit.
Another way of getting material from the sixties and seventies is that a couple of years ago,
I curated an exhibition and we have an annual history festival in Copenhagen where, you know, there's a theme.
It started with the Golden Ages in the sixties.
But now because it's an annual festival and so they've reached more contemporary time.
So a couple of years ago, the theme was the seventies. And it's mostly either history or it's, you know, fine art, culture, etc.
So I proposed we did an exhibition of ordinary people's photographs where they could send in their photographs.
And that was a way for me to get material from the seventies.
But otherwise, this other exhibition was...When I started working with photography,
there weren't many institutions or galleries didn't show photography or anything.
But 25 years ago, the Centre for Photography opened in Copenhagen.
And so that was the 25th birthday of the gallery.
And they invited me to curate this exhibition because I had had been there all along the whole period.
So that was super interesting for me. Just to dive into my own past as a photography critic and as an academic and people I've known and I just,
you know, make some cuts into the history of Danish art photography.
GB: And did you learn anything from the experience of having to shape it into an exhibition for a lot?
MS: I mean, I learnt a lot.
But the one thing that was I mean, one of the things that struck me is the generation that kind of matured in the two thousands, maybe 10 years ago.
They are now into commercial galleries.
They live from it, et cetera, and the oldest work we had in the exhibition, was a fantastic colour, sepia work from a woman.
It's six metres wide and two metres high, which is a work I remembered from the late 80s.
That was one of the first pieces of art criticism I did on that work.
So this woman, when she came to the exhibition, we had chosen to present the work.
She unpacked it and it hadn't been packed out for 22 years.
I was like, what? This amazing work.
It's just been standing somewhere, you know, she has paid expensive, you know, storage rooms for it.
And so that was just an example of, you know, how much has happened in photography commercially in the gallery world as well.
So young artists around 40 years old, they should be really happy and proud
I mean,
think about standing on the shoulders of someone who did a lot of work in maybe the seventies and eighties and they haven't been recognised.
GB: So we've got a question for you. Picking up on the discussion of ethnographic photographs in Denmark Mette.
How do you think that the work of contemporary art is dealing with cultural difference?
How artists you write about, such as Tina Enghoff, can negotiate
the idea of the photographic document in a way that doesn't reproduce the dynamic of the colonial archive in Denmark.
MS: I think
it's a current internationally that artists kind of rework the archive
maybe or make works that are much more complex instead of - speaking of Greenland -
you mentioned Tina Enghoff, she's done work on Greenland. Her most recent work is about Greenland.
So instead of going to Greenland and photographing icebergs and whatever people in Canoes for the fifth time or so,
what she does is to make kind of collaborative projects with people.
The lost project she did was called Displaced,
where she met a man in his seventies in Greenland who when he was a child in the fifties,
he got kind of deported or displaced to Denmark, which was not common at the time because he was limping.
And there was a nurse who saw that and then sent him to - he was five years old or something - the hospital in Denmark.
And he spent several years there.
And now as an older man, he doesn't remember anything from that period and why he was there.
So what she did was look into the Danish archives and to take out as much material about his destiny
in Denmark and bring it back and discuss it with him and making it kind of open history,
his history, but also a history of, you know, the relationship with Denmark and Greenland and the forgotten memories, the forgotten archives.
So there's a lot of things going on
in that area. And it's something maybe in between, you know, documentary art, ethnography, anthropology.
And that's a very interesting field that someone that like her represents.
But of course, I mean, this is an international current. Yeah.
GB: Let me ask you a supplementary question. Mette do you think somebody like you or I could learn something from an artist like this. That is, is this
a prompt for you and I to invent a different kind of voice for the art historian or for the photo historian?
Do we need to do that rather than the traditional somewhat documentary voice, you might call it?
Do we need to invent a new voice to talk about contemporary photography?
MS: Hmmm, I mean, maybe we don't need it, but it's a good idea to try it and
I don't know how it is with your Department of Art history here, but I guess many art historians and in Denmark and elsewhere will try to, you know.
write in other ways, I mean, it's a whole new current in a way that is more inspired by fiction,
for instance, I haven't really done it myself because it's super difficult.
I mean, the other day we talked about someone like Carol Maeva who writes,
who specialises in photography and started out maybe with a more traditionally historical way of working.
And now she's actually calling herself a writer of fiction and she's gone more in that way.
But I guess it's also extremely difficult and it can be, you know, super uninteresting.
So but I encourage people.
And we have a study group in my department of people working with photography where some of them are artists also.
And we get inspired from their way of writing about photography.
And we always discuss examples of how to write more, maybe personally, creatively, openly on photography.
I mean, you can do that on literature and anything as well.
But I don't know, with photography, there's something maybe more open and personal in the material as such, that encourages other kinds of writing.
GB: I was wondering because, you know, the department, you got your degree in and now
the department that you're teaching, the nature of it, the way you describe it,
it does sound like an interestingly interdisciplinary culture in which different kinds of
ways of thinking about visual culture seem possible within a history of art department.
But it sounds like you're very much embedded in interdisciplinary conversation.
GB: Definitely. And I think that's a major asset.
And I didn't really realise I mean, when I was head of department, every time we had a position up, we always have like two legs.
You should be an expert in one discipline, but you should also do something interesting and ideally,
work in interdisciplinary ways also.
So you could consider if you were an art historian, you should be able to teach in some way students from literature, musicology, etc.
And I realised that we had many applicants who actually like that and weren't used
to that from their own more classical way of structuring it in France or Germany,
etc. So I think it's a major asset that we try all the time to teach across
borders and we have research groups consisting of people from musicology,
theatre, art, history, et cetera. GB: And so these research groups speak to each other,
you mean, there are people from all those disciplines in the same group? MS: Exactly.
Yeah. And that's what we try to encourage. We are around 80 staff members, only if we include the postdocs.
So it's a big department where we have these possibilities.
GB: I mean, it sounds like it could be wonderfully fertile or a complete nightmare.
And as head of department, you must have experienced both sides of it. MS: Yeah, I mean, it was sometimes difficult to get people to collaborate.
But from the other side I was coming from actually I would say the most collaborative discipline, which is literature and cultural studies.
I think it works really well. And it is an asset. On a daily basis, it works very well most of the time. It's more about if you know,
when it comes to money and positions, who is going to have the next position?
Is it musicology people, the theatre people, etc. then the quarrel starts.
But that's I guess always. And then anyway, maybe down in Oxford - we are being cut all the time in the Humanities in Denmark.
So we struggle with with the economy.
GB: Yeah. Well that was the context in which I came to Oxford. And as you know, I'm keen that history of art prove itself worthy of continued funding.
And we need to constantly be thinking about how to make art history relevant to our community and to the world in which we live.
Well, Mette, you do that every day, and I'm very grateful for you sharing your efforts with our audience.
Thank you so much for your time. MS: It was a pleasure. And thanks for having me on board.
I'm super happy that you invited me to come.
GB: I know. We're happy to have you. I mean,
it's been unfortunate that the last 18 months or so we haven't had academic visitors because it does enrich our intellectual
environment to have people coming and doing research and sharing a different experience like the one you've had from,
Denmark, with students and indeed the rest of my colleagues.
So it's really good to have you here. And we hope you're the first of several more that will be coming over the next year or so.
So thank you Mette. Thank you, everybody, for listening. I look forward to speaking next week.
My guest is Anthony Gardner, who teaches at the Ruskin Arts Centre and specialises in contemporary art of
various kinds that he's going to be explaining to us this coming Wednesday.
So hopefully I'll see all of you there on my screen thern.
Thank you very much.