Lennart Olson; Mjellby Konstmuseum, Halmstad,
SwedenGroup Exhibitions
1953 European Postwar Photography; Museum of Modern
Art, New York, New York
1954 Subjektive Fotografie II; Staatlichen Schule fu ̈r Kunst
und Handwerk (State Art and Crafts School), Saar-
bru ̈cken, Germany
1958 Fotokonst—Tio Fotografer; Lunds Konsthall, Lund,
Sweden
1970 Tio Fotografer; Bibliothe`que nationale de France,
Paris, France
1982 The Frozen Image: Scandinavian Photography; Walker
Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and traveling
1984 Subjektive Fotografie, Images of the 50s; Museum Folk-
wang, Essen, Germany, and traveled to the San Fran-
cisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California
Selected Works
Tjo ̈rn bridge XIII, Sweden, 1961
Emilia Romagna II, 1962
Tjo ̈rn bridge XVIII, Sweden, 1961
Triptych tjo ̈rn Bridge, Sweden, 1961
Tjo ̈rn bridge IV, Sweden, 1966
Red Light, Stockholm, 1970
Anatolien, 1976
Grange-in-Borrowdale I. River Derwent, England, 1991
Postbridge, Dartmoor, England, 1991Further Reading
Friedman, Martin.The Frozen Image: Scandinavian Photo-
graphy. New York: Abbeville Press, 1982.
Olson, Lennart.Litet Stockholmsalbum. Stockholm: 1961.
Olson, Lennart, and Kristian Romare.Lennart Olson: Foto-
grafier. Stockholm: Lennart Olson, 1989.
Olson, Lennart.From One Side to the Other: Bridges Photo-
graphed by Lennart Olson. Stockholm: Byggforlaget,
2000.
Eskildsen, Ute.Subjektive Fotografie: Images of the ’50s.
Essen: A Museum Folkwang and San Francisco: San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1984.OPTICS
Optics defines light and vision, two fields of knowl-
edge of profound importance to photography.
Like any modern science, optics is comprised of
numerous specialties, but the one most pertinent to
the development of photography is classical optics.
Also known as geometric optics, the discipline aro-
se between the sixth and third centuries BCE in
Greece, when painters, philosophers, and mathe-
maticians began investigating the mechanics of
vision. Aristotle presents one of the earliest discus-
sions of optics, followed by Euclid and Claudius
Ptolemy, each of whom devoted multiple treatises
to the subject. While optics achieved prominence
as a science, it is likely that the impulse for research
into the principles of vision began with Classical
painters who developed naturalism as the domi-
nant aesthetic of Greek art.
Greek theorists held that art should present the
appearance of reality. In one famous example, the
artist Apelles painted grapes so realistically that
they fooled the birds that had flocked to eat them.
However, Greek naturalism went beyond the pro-
per modeling of form. Painting was conceived as a
window onto an imaginary world that fooled the
eyes. To achieve the effect of depth on a two-dimen-
sional surface, painters developed linear perspec-
tive, a technique for representing the appearance
of objects in three dimensions. Investigations into
linear perspective led to the discovery of principles
that explain how the visual field is constituted from
physical space.
In his fourth century treatise,Physics, Aristotle
described optics as a subaltern science that is derived
from geometry. The contrast between theOpticsand
Geometryof Euclid clearly delineate the subaltern
status of visual knowledge.Geometryis a fat tome
containing an extensive exposition of its subject.
Opticsis a slender companion volume that presents
a modified form of geometric reasoning. Optics
shares postulates with geometry, but Euclid uses
them to describe appearances of things rather than
the construction of objects. It is through this geo-
metric pedigree that optics, and by corollary photo-
graphy, is related to a much earlier representationalOLSON, LENNART