Christer Strömholm (Sweden, 1918–2002)
"The Hiroshima Suite," 1963 (22 parts)

Hasselblad Award winner Christer Strömholm (1918–2002) is the only Scandinavian photographer featured in The Museum of Modern Art in New York’s permanent collection on the history of photography.

It is Strömholm’s “Pale Lady” (1959) that has been part of this prestigious collection since the 1980s. The French newspaper Le Monde called Strömholm “Le Grand Suédois” in a review in December 2001, shortly before the photographer’s death, and emphasized Strömholm’s status as one of the giants of 20th-century European photography.

The Hiroshima suite, consisting of 22 photographs, was created in 1961 and 1963, when Strömholm visited Japan. At the time, Christer Strömholm was married to SAS flight attendant Anna-Clara Krusenberg, who was able to bring her photographer husband along on these trips at little cost.

Christer Strömholm is best known for his photographs of transvestites and transsexuals in Paris in the late 1950s and early 1960s. These images were featured in the books *Poste Restante* (1967) and *Friends from Place Blanche* (1983), both of which have become classics.

The photographer’s Hiroshima series, however, has gone relatively unnoticed. This is despite the fact that the series ranks among Strömholm’s finest photographic achievements. With a restrained and understated style, the photographer has depicted the consequences of the Hiroshima bomb with incredible political acuity. Strömholm’s Hiroshima series also serves as an important complement to Japanese photographic classics such as Kikuji Kawada’s *The Map* (1965) and Ken Domon’s *Hiroshima* (1961).

Christer Strömholm’s Hiroshima suite was created in collaboration with the then-gallery owner Lars Hall, who organized three solo exhibitions for the photographer in 1978, 1982, and 1984 at the legendary Camera Obscura in Stockholm. This was before Moderna Museet presented Strömholm in a solo exhibition in 1986. The exhibition at Moderna attracted over 40,000 visitors and marked Christer Strömholm’s major breakthrough.

The Hiroshima suite has only been shown in its entirety on two occasions: as a mini-exhibition at Camera Obscura, in connection with the 1980 nuclear referendum, and in 2001 at Liljevalch’s exhibition “368 Loves: The Collections of Karin and Lars Hall.”

Hasse Persson

Provenance: Karin & Lars Hall’s collection, Stockholm.