Bildaktivisterna. Aktioner i bild i svenskt 1960- och 1970-tal
[The Image Activists. Actions in image in the 1960s and 1970s in Sweden]
Jonas (J) Magnusson & Cecilia Grönberg
OEI editör, OEI BOOKS #3, 2023
1064 pages
In the summer of 1968, photographers Tommy Tommie, Björn Myrman and Bengt O Nordin launch a photo group called the Image Activists. In edgy text and image montages, they create powerful critical messages, Actions in Images – a concept and a practice that they invent and explore with an intense energy during 1968 and 1969. The Image Activists, encompassing around seventy members in Stockholm and in local groups in Landskrona, Gävle and Gothenburg, stress the importance of knowing what is being documented and how the photographs are being used. They insist on taking responsibility for an information system in its entirety: not only the production of photographs, but also their distribution, presentation and use in contexts that the group can support.
The Image Activists. Actions in image in the 1960s and 1970s Sweden is a book that in 25 chapters and more than 1100 images presents the activities, working methods and collaborations of the Image Activists in Stockholm and other parts of Sweden during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Jonas (J) Magnusson & Cecilia Grönberg are active as editors, writers, researchers and artists. Based in Stockholm, they have worked together since 2001 on a range of publishing projects: books, magazines, exhibitions. Their work often revolves around questions of archives, images, documents, montage, fieldwork, stratigraphy, sites and more experimental and visual forms of historiography. Since the early 2000s they have been running the magazine and publishing structure OEI. Their books include: Leviatan från Göteborg; Omkopplingar; Witz-bomber och foto-sken; Händelsehorisont: distribuerad fotografi; Bildaktivisterna. Aktioner i bild i svenskt 1960- och 1970-tal.
OEI is a Stockholm based magazine for extra-disciplinary spaces and de-disciplinizing moments – experimental forms of thinking, montages of art, poetry, theory, and documents; critical investigations, infrastructural poetics and historiographies. OEI, founded in 1999, has published 105 issues. The publishing structure OEI editör, founded in 2002, has released a 150 titles of investigative poetry, aesthetic documents, photo books, bookworks, and theory. The OEI BOOKS series includes extensive visual/textual artistic research projects in book form.
OEI is an artistic and literary publishing project run by Jonas (J) Magnusson and Cecilia Grönberg.