The Experimental Self: Edvard Munch’s Photography

Internationally celebrated for his paintings, prints, and watercolors, Norwegian artist Edvard Munch
(1863–1944) also took photographs. This exhibition of photographs and films by Edvard Munch emphasizes the artist’s experimentalism, examining his exploration of the camera as an expressive medium. By probing and exploiting the dynamics of “faulty” practice, such as distortion, blurred motion, eccentric camera angles, and other photographic “mistakes,” Munch photographed himself and his immediate environment in ways that rendered them poetic. In still images and in his few forays with a hand-held moving-picture camera, Munch not only archived images, but invented them.

On loan to Scandinavia House: The Nordic Center in America, from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway, the approximately 50 copy prints in the exhibition and the continuous screening of the DVD containing Munch’s films will be accompanied by contextualizing didactic panels. One will be historical and biographical, and the others will examine Munch’s photographic exploration.