Vintage silver print 20,7 x 29,3 cm (8.1 x 11.5 in)
Annotations from magazine layout and with Strömholms handwriting reading “Return to Christer Strömholm, Ploggatan 1, 116 34 Stockholm” on the reverse
PROVENANCE Estate of Christer Strömholm
LITERATURE Christer Strömholm, The Art of being there, Stockholm 1991; Christer Strömholm, Christer Strömholm 1918 - 2002. On verra bien, Stockholm 2002, pl. 61; Christer Strömholm, Collection Photopoche, Arles 2006; Galleri Final, Enfants Terribles, Malmö 2007, p. 30; Joakim Strömholm/Patric Leo (eds.), Post Scriptum, London 2012, p. 265.

Between 1959 and 1963, Strömholm travelled repeatedly to Spain, Northern Africa, India, America and Japan – where he took haunting pictures of the victims of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The close-up of a blind girl with scars on her face is surely the most wellknown of the series.
Once seen, it is never forgotten. Like most of Strömholm’s photographs, this one seems unpolished and shadowed, since it was taken spontaneously and in the light available. Using the “existing light” was a central credo to him. Disturbingly, Strömholm confronts the viewer with a reality that is taboo and all too eagerly repressed. He lets the viewer experience unadorned human suffering without compromising the dignity of those he portrays.
Strömholm, active under the name Christer Christian as a member of the group “fotoform” around Otto Steinert during the 1950s, never settled for sober experiments, structural photographs etc, but always kept his eye on the human element. Thus, his image of an anonymous blind girl is one of his best works, and it is no coincidence that it frequently recurs in the photographer’s.