From Back Home by Anders Petersen and JH Engström
National Media Museum, Bradford
Until 27 March 2011
Review by Simon Bowcock

Anders Petersen has been a photographic legend ever since Café Lehmitz, the seedy Hamburg bar he documented in the late 1960s with such edgy and heartfelt directness. JH Engström, best known for his 2003 book Trying to Dance, assisted Petersen as an up-and-coming photographer in the 1990s, and continues a dark and very Swedish 'stream of consciousness”' lineage started by Petersen’s one-time teacher, Christer Strömholm. Both Petersen and Engström hail from Värmland, a landlocked and largely rural part of Sweden which is the subject of this sizeable show. Unglamorous and very unlikely to be used by the local tourist board, both men’s work could nonetheless be considered a kind of love letter to home.

In common with his previous output, Petersen photographs with a visceral immediacy, and his large, dirty, black-and-white prints give you the feeling he is a participant in the situations he depicts. This is great cycle of life stuff, from the gore of a baby being delivered, all the way through to someone apparently being measured up for a coffin. Close ups of people dominate, with the focus on the social and the sexual, from an ageing, French-kissing couple through to a woman showing us her knickers (a recurring Petersen motif). With a few exceptions - such as a girl dancing or the woman laughing on the phone - the tone is bleak, accentuated by the uncompromising monochrome: even the May Queens picking flowers are surrounded by a sense of foreboding. Two images in particular - the sad, cowed old man with a plaster across his nose, and a guy crying in the woods – sum up the mood.

Engström’s signature style is very different, with his smaller, more 'snapshot' prints mixing both colour and black and white, and featuring the occasional overexposure and the odd muted colour palette. Despite this apparently inconsistent approach, the pictures tend to hang together well, and mostly share a doggedly melancholic mood. Compared with Petersen, Engström is much more detached from his subject matter, and while he too is concerned with people, he seems just as interested in things.

Despite employing their very different trademark approaches, both photographers leave the viewer with only fragmentary impressions: it is never explicitly clear what is happening, and you are never entirely sure of context. That said, the pictures are carefully sequenced, and relating each one to its neighbours sometimes teases out more meaning. Interestingly, both men’s photographs are also difficult to date: they are all fairly recent, but do not necessarily look it.

Idiosyncratic and significant photography, this exhibition represents brave programming by the Museum and is highly recommended.