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sity Press, 1978.LENNART OLSON
Swedish
Best known as a photographer of bridges, Lennart
Olson has also carved out an unmistakable style.
Lennart Olson started working as a freelance pho-
tographer in 1954 and quickly became one of the
leading photographers in Sweden; among many
other achievements he was a founding member of
the Swedish photographic association ‘‘Tio Foto-
grafer.’’ He has produced several books and his
images have been shown at many exhibitions in
Sweden and abroad, including the Museum of Mo-
dern Art (MoMA) in New York. In the 1960s,
Olson worked for some years as a filmmaker, pro-
ducing more than 50 documentary films for Swed-
ish television.
As a photographer and an artist, Olson has devel-
oped gradually, taking time to seek his dream and
fashion a language of imagery all his own. The
camera is his instrument and in the darkroom he
strengthens that which he wishes to express. The
son of a professional photographer in Fritsla, a
town outside Boras, Olson had the opportunity to
learn about the medium at an early age, and he
started to photograph in 1931 at the age of six.
Young Lennart studied printmaking at the Royal
Swedish Academy in Stockholm, his expertise as a
photographer being largely self-taught. He worked
in professional photo studios until he entered the
Swedish Air Force in 1945. After his discharge
Olson married and started a family, supporting
himself as a commercial and studio photographer
specializing in architectural assignments. His works
were widely published in such European magazines
asIndustrı ̈aandArkitektur.
In 1951, Olson traveled to Paris and became one
of the first photographers to embrace the new,
international currents shaping postwar photogra-
phic practice. Postwar photographers were explor-
ing new spheres, conceiving their works in terms of
concretism and abstraction, wherein photography
was its own reality, not one that merely represented
the larger reality. Photographers were particularly
attuned to space and how photography could create
‘‘new spaces’’—concerned with the medium’s inher-
ent ability to express the line and the surface play of
imagery, allowing one to find abstract form. Ed-
ward Steichen said in a 1952 interview:
Look at Lennart Olson...he is one of the most interesting
of the younger generation of photographers, not for the
graphical elegance of the pictures, but for their signifi-
cance, content, their visual interpretation of space,
deep, boundlessness...His line patterns reach far out
into the universe, whirl round his visionary ionosphere.
An international career was developing. In 1953,
Steichen presented Olson at MoMA as a prominent
figure of the postwar generation of photographers.
When the museum’s permanent photography de-
partment opened, Olson was the main attractionOFFICE OF WAR INFORMATION