Capturing the range of exposure is another problematic factor. Think of a room right before twilight — outside the window a street is lit by the setting sun. For the person inside, it is easy to differentiate both the light outside and the darkness inside, thanks to the human eye’s exceptional optical range. Now think of a photograph. It’s necessary to choose an exact exposure. If the outside is clear, the inside is black. If the room is clear, the outside is completely white, or washed out as we professionals say.
But I had my subjects — not portraits of people, as I was much too inhibited for that. Strindberg’s excellent ideas about a portrait studio were not possible for me considering my own level of expertise. But cityscapes, where people appeared at a distance, that was my specialty. I saw them, but they didn’t see me. I liked to study their movements in an almost scientific way.
The movements of people. Yes. Very interesting. Perhaps you remember the old theory that cars about to turn didn’t really need their turn signals? The beginning of the turn, that subtle initial indication, the slight deflection of the front wheels as they turn to the left or to the right, should be enough for other drivers to know what would happen. People’s walking movements can be interpreted in the same way. That man there will soon turn — or stop; that woman with him — or not — are they walking beside each other because they are friends or colleagues, or are they strangers who just happened to be walking near each other at the same moment and will soon head in different directions? All of this is endlessly fascinating. You could draw them as figures on a graph.
One November day, the snow-covered but sunny Drottninggatan outside my window felt like the right choice as my photographic subject. An f-stop of 16 and five hundredths of a second. In spite of the strong light, mysterious figures seemed to sneak about trying not to be seen. I wanted to capture them, list them, make it clear to myself what was about to happen. But in the photographs, they were always turned away. Then I decided to take pictures of the room instead. The window became a rectangle without detail. The floor covered in glass shards and dirt. The furniture smashed. Artistic pictures, perhaps, but to what end?
The spirit of the times: the realization that injustice was exploding in countries all over the world demanded that stenciled pamphlets must be written and distributed. The subjects included Vietnam being bombed by the United States and France, with an independence movement in the North. Spain, Greece, and Portugal — dictatorships all, with Portugal fighting a gruesome war against the independence movement in their colony of Angola. Latin America, where many regimes relied on torture. South Africa, with its unsustainable apartheid system. Just a few examples. We young people were outraged by all the neglect and oppression going on in the world. Perhaps we were less observant when it came to the disparity on our own streets.
During the evening, I would observe the movements of the people outside my window and develop my own theories. On the other side of Drottninggatan, all the buildings had already been torn down. A large construction site was extending in all directions around a gaping pit in the center to form a so-called super-ellipse. The remaining residents had to use temporary stairs and wooden walkways. These were rebuilt every week and were not easy to navigate.
The patterns that people made, evening after evening, interested me very much. Three men were different from all the others. They seemed together and yet were not. They moved stealthily as if they did not want to be seen. They spied and wrote down secret things in their black notebooks. I would sketch them and their movements. My sketchbook was filled with page after page of identical labyrinths. I called them the Three Wise Men. Agent Caspar, Agent Melchior, and Agent Balthazar. The patterns they made would form the letter Z or the number 8. What did they want? Sometimes a fourth person would appear, a woman in a brown dress and a small hat. She seemed to be their boss. In my notes, I called her Maria. She’d use slight tilts of her head to indicate to the other three where they should go.
The late fifties and early sixties were an odd time in the history of Stockholm. Huge swaths of downtown were demolished. It was the largest rearrangement of an inner city in Europe, especially for a country that had not been bombed during the war. That area we now call “city” looked so much like a war zone then that my pal from art school, Håkan Alexandersson, and I made a short war film there in 1960. In those days, every household in Sweden had received a brochure called If the War Comes about the dangers of falling atomic bombs. We titled our film Until the Fire Is Out due to the ridiculous advice in that brochure which in our minds minimized the danger. If your clothes start to burn, roll on the ground until the fire is out.
One afternoon, I had a desire to search for any of Wahlberg’s leftover negatives and — with the help of a crowbar — I broke open a Masonite wall to find a closet-sized space of about two square meters. Both walls had cracks. The space itself was empty. Of course, it felt only natural to test one of the cracks with my crowbar. A layer of broken bits fell to the floor. Dust flew up and I couldn’t see much for a moment, but when it settled, I found a very old door. Crack! The crowbar did its work; the door fell toward me and I jumped out of the way. The dust had to settle once more before I realized I’d found an old passage to the building next door, Drottninggatan 35.
There were a number of conspiracy theories in those days. One of the basic theories speculated that the owners of Stockholm’s old buildings let them decay until tearing them down would become inevitable. Repairs and renovations were held off until it was too late to do anything. Over eight hundred buildings were torn down in Stockholm from the midfifties to the midseventies. Most of these had been constructed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Very few were considered part of our cultural inheritance. One exception was my building, Drottninggatan 37, which, of course, was irritating for the developers. All they saw was space to exploit with a protected building in their way. That they would go so far as to set fires to the buildings themselves — that was a theory that even I, a diehard Communist, found hard to believe.
All that time, I had to force myself to believe that there had to be a reason for the social heartlessness in Sweden, the architectural helplessness in Stockholm, and my own situation.
Actually, I have to say that my paranoia was proven justified, because I came to be interrogated by two policemen who wanted me to confess that foreign powers had employed me to bring anarchy to the streets. They had three possible employers in mind: Albania, Cuba, or China. I was brought to the police station on Kungsholmen and I would probably have laughed in their faces about the absurdity of the accusation (these poverty-stricken countries couldn’t afford anything like this) if the policemen hadn’t been so intimidating. They placed me on a small chair in the middle of the room — well, I’ve described this matter in detail before. It had to do with an art installation I’d had at Galleri Karlsson, a little space near Odenplan. And I was declared guilty by the judge, but not for spying, as the police had hoped. Just for desecration of a state symbol and for agitation. The latter stemmed from a lithography where I’d written, Betray your country, don’t be nationalistic.