RAW POWER
– and endless stills

Photographs by Mats Bäcker

12th March – 2nd May

For the past quarter-century, Mats Bäcker has been one of the leading Nordic photographers of dramatic art. He started photographing punk rock in Lund for the press and for record covers during the late 1970s and is now resident photographer at the Royal Stockholm Opera.
The picture he took of Iggy Pop in 1978 now ranks as a classic. After a decade, as both musician and photographer, in the rock music industry, he transferred to the theatre, initially working for the Stockholm Dramatic Theatre and other stages but latterly concentrating mainly on dance and opera.

Mats Bäcker has always been provocative and experimental. His pictures have caught the eye with their combination of advertising iconography and documentary transience, dissolving the boundaries between dreams, play and reality and resulting in a number of now classical posters for several Scandinavian theatres and opera houses. The strong command he posses of colour and form sets his pictures apart from the deluge of images all around us.

This exhibition brings together early punk pictures and the latest experiments in dance photography, a summary of more than 30 years’ dramatic art. Also included, though, are pictures which have not been shown previously, taken in the shade of stage lighting. Several of these photographs exemplify a species of exploration in partnership with the stage artists, a kind of “work in progress”.

 
Pictures from the exhibition
Click on pictures for enlargement. More photos from the exhibition are found at www.matsbacker.se/raw