Håkan Ludwigson Livres

The Texas prison system registers 450 deaths a year. Families make no claim for 100 of them. They have been buried in the Joe Byrd Cemetery near Huntsville since the mid-nineteenth century. Inmates look after the cemetery as well as fabricate the gravestones. An "x" means that the prisoner was executed. A "999" indicates that he died while waiting on death row. The Swedish artists Lennart Grebelius and Håkan Ludwigson set up a final monument to these "unwanted." Ludwigson photographed the stone crosses in a rigorously aesthetic manner against an identical black background. An accompanying table lists who the deceased were: their name, their age, their profession, their crime, the duration of their imprisonment, and their mode of death. A macabre yet immensely powerful series.

Balls and Bulldust is a rich collection of images that explores life and work among the cattlemen in the Northern Territory in Australia. It is not another cowboy story, rather one about men and women working very hard, and seeking some kind of solitude and sense of space in the midst of harsh conditions. For some, life in Australia’s outback is a life-long routine. The young are attracted by its romanticism, which is – more often than not – shattered by reality’s hardships. The red dust covering this vast scrubby landscape and filling the air is prevalent in Ludwigson’s images. Days can be blistering hot and temperatures at nights may sometimes fall below zero. People sleep on “swags” on the ground for weeks. The food is drab and the men are in their saddles twelve hours a day mustering herds of cattle, branding and castrating young bulls. Håkan Ludwigson, who is one of the world’s leading commercial photographers, spent three months with the cattlemen of the Australian outback early in his career, and returned to his native Sweden with a body of work that became Balls and Bulldust in 2012. The work was first exhibited at Strandverket Konsthall on Marstrand in Sweden in 2012. The exhibition was curated by Hasse Persson.

Swedish-born Håkan Ludwigsson is one of the select star photographers of Condé Nast Traveler . In New York's trend-conscious media scene, his name is invoked with particular respect, a respect that Ludwigsson has earned through 16 years of successful photography. Technical perfection and visual brilliance are the hallmark of his picture essays for what is the quintessential travel magazine. In Taken Out of Context , Ludwigson's photography shows that the boundaries between the medium's various genres are becoming increasingly difficult to define. The book interweaves advertising photos made for leading car companies with documentary shots taken for Condé Nast Traveler in the visual language that Ludwigsson shares with American art photographers such as William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz and Stephen Shore. According to Ludwigson, his ambition is "to create a personal, visual language that lies somewhere between art, documentary and classical photography." Here, Ludwigson ultimately displays a healthy questioning attitude to the global adventure industry that he has helped to create through his visual art.