Morten Andersen / Shadowlab

Hva F20 betyr, er relativt åpent. Her ser vi bilder av byens løse fugler i vid forstand, områder og mennesker du aldri vil finne i Visit Oslos bildebank,- på glossy papir i magasinformat. I motsetning til i hans første bok, Fast City fra 1999, hvor gamle bygårder er forlatt og grå, ser vi nå massive grå nybygg. Bygningsarbeiderne er også representert.

Mange av bildene er tatt ut av vinduet fra Andersens hjem, hvor han har orkesterplass til benken som disponeres nabolagets helter og antihelter, her er det loking, fixing, klining, soving og avislesning – i fugleperspektiv. Vi ser reder og reir, fraflyttet og bebodd, av folk og fugl.

“More and more of us live in cities, more than half of us actually and that figure is just growing, rapidly. But it’s not in Europe or North America we live. Well some of us do. The largest and fastest growing cities we find in Asia, South America and Africa. But bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better and the challenges with pollution, overpopulation, poverty, housing, transportation, drinking water, sanitation, energy, crime, social inequality and so on seems endless. Endless cities in every sense.

With curiosity, camera and boots made for walking I set out to explore the streets of Mexico City, Cairo, Mumbai, Kolkata, Dhaka, Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Djakarta and Lagos. All megacities with a population of 10 or more millions, sometimes up to 20 with the greater metropolitan areas included. Cities with two, three, four times as many people than in little Norway where I live. Except from Shanghai they were all new ground to me, not that I recognized anything from my late 1980s visit there, things change fast and with just about a week in each place, accompanied with my usual jetlag and diarrhea, I am just scratching on a tiny bit of the surface here.

Usually when we see photographic work from the megacity it’s often about spectacular architecture so I have focused more on the human element and the energy of the city experienced at a grass-root level. How people move, look, play, dance… small stories, from big cities.”

Nyutgivelse! Morten Andersens første fotobok, Fast City, ble gitt ut for 20 år siden, og har vært utsolgt og ettertrakta på samlermarkedet internasjonalt i flere år.

Happy-Tom skriver i pressemeldingen til utgivelsen i 1999:

«— He knows the streets, and the winners and losers and in-betweens and up-and-comers and down-and outers which inhabit them. He takes on the city like a distant pimp, creating a mega-gestalt out of the bits and pieces that make up the visual cortex of his voyeristic suburban mind, cunningly blending in the timeless taboos of witchcraft and pollution into the thousands of colours that make up gray, feeding of the collective high voltage lines of history like a culture vulture, treating the city with the simultaneousreverence and disdain of a Mark Chapman-esque fan-cum-assassin, dealing with a city that he loves and loathes. »

Bokas bildespråk markerte et skille i norsk fotografi, og også internasjonalt. Som en av fire norske fotobøker ble Fast City tatt med i Martin Parr og Gerry Badgers referanseverk «The photobook; A history vol. 3»; “Ultimately, however, Fast City is an edgy but nevertheless affectionate portrait of a city Andersen felt had been underphotographed in a serious way. — Fast City is a remarkably expressive portrait of a city and a lifestyle, and is also notable for Andersen´s decision to combine colour with black and white, a combination that is uncommon even today but which back in 1999 was very rare indeed.” Gerry Badgers etterord i denne nye utgaven setter boka inn i en fotohistorisk sammenheng, og beskriver hva som er særegent Andersendsk og nyskapende ved den. «— To be sure, there is more than a whiff of Scandinavian gloom, but even that might only be a touch of irony. Certainly, Andersen’s vision exhibits neither the positivist energy of American City Noir photographers, not the frenetic angst of the Japanese, but something of both.»

10. mai 1945 styrtet et Short Stirling LK147 fly fra Storbritannia i ravinelandskapet ved Gardermoen, alle 20 om bord døde. Flyet var en del av Operation Doomsday som skulle avvæpne de tyske styrkene etter at krigen var over to dager før.

Alle bilder fotografert i Romerike Landskapsvernområde 2018/2019.