The Image Activists: Actions in Image in the 1960s and 1970s in Sweden

This talk will present Bildaktivisterna. Aktioner i bild i svenskt 1960- och 1970-tal (“The Image Activists: Actions in Image in the 1960s and 1970s in Sweden”), a 1064 page book by Jonas (J) Magnusson & Cecilia Grönberg (OEI editor 2023) on the intense activities of a previously non-historicized socialist Swedish photo collective called the Image Activists. Even if many of them were photographers, they insisted on being a non-media-specific collective, and also included visual artists, filmmakers, sociologists, and journalists. But even as they revolutionized Swedish photography with their new and explosive media dispositive – one critic called them “a splitting wedge for a completely new image era” –, they were subsequently left out of history.

The book – including an encompassing visual material from the activists’ own archives – is an attempt to bring these intensities back into the present, by documenting and analyzing all of the Image Activists’ different actions and exhibitions.