This year marks the 80th birthday of Swedish photographer Gerry Johansson, a master of quiet observation and poetic minimalism. Throughout his six-decade-long career, Johansson has developed a distinctive photographic language, one that speaks to the beauty found in the mundane, the forgotten, and the overlooked. His meticulously composed grayscale photographs capture his exploration of left-behind landscapes, silent towns, and empty streets around the globe. Throughout his career, Johansson has published over forty photobooks. Notable titles among his works are classics like America (1982), Sweden (2005), Deutschland (2012) and Pontiac (2011) as well as more recent books such as Maine (2024), Spanish Summer (2022) and Tokyo (2016), each showcasing his care ful attention to detail and narrative depth. He was the first photographer to receive the Lars Tunbjörk Prize (2019), and last year (2024), Johansson received the prestigious Prince Eugene Medal for his outstanding artistic achievements.
In 1963, at the age of 18, he spent a year in New Jersey with family friends. The idea was to find a job, but that proved difficult. He lingered for days in Manhattan with his camera, photographing street scenes. He also joined The Village Camera Club, which was a great place to meet other photographers. Twenty years later, he returned for a trip from the west to the east coast – coast to coast – and visited the who’s who of American photography at the time. In L.A., he chauffeured Gary Winogrand for a few days and met Robert Adams, visited Henry Wessel Jr. in San Francisco, and Egglestone in Memphis. Johansson doesn’t call it a formative trip because he had already achieved success with his work. „At that time, I had already had an exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. In hindsight, it was a kind of retrospective, because after that, my interests began to change.“ The trip also served as a blueprint for his later work in many ways. People disappeared from the picture, and the emphasis shifted to landscape photography and everyday objects: houses, shops, churches, factories, cars, tires, trees, anything could become the subject of Johansson’s work. Always photographed with a medium format camera and always in perfect composition.
We are excited to present Gerry Johansson’s work at Photo Basel this year, from June 17th to 22nd.
