Experimental Self : The Photography of Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch was the first artist of his time to use the camera for "selfies". Munch saw the camera as another way to express himself artistically.

"I have an old camera with which I have taken countless photographs of myself. It often produces astonishing effects", Edvard Munch states in a 1930 interview. "Someday when I am old and have nothing better to do than work on an autobiography, all my photographic self-portraits will see the light of day again." The autobiography was never realized, but the self-portraits have found their way to the pages of The Experimental Self. The Photography of Edvard Munch, which demonstrates the fundamentally experimental nature of the artist’s photographic practice. As a photographer, Munch embraced the freedom provided by the amateur position, and the unpredictable aspects of analogue photographic technology. By playfully approaching his own image in picture after picture, Munch extends his explorations of selfhood in other media through photography. The resulting photographs provide unique access to Munch’s radical artistic vision, which this book studies through eminent essays by Patricia G. Berman, Tom Gunning and MaryClaire Pappas.

Patricia G. Berman holds the Feldberg Chair of Art at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, U.S., specializing in modern and contemporary art, photography, and propaganda studies. She has also taught at the University of Oslo where she facilitated the research network “Munch, Modernism, and Modernity.” Her books and exhibition catalogues include studies of Edvard Munch, the Belgian artist James Ensor, nineteenth-century Danish painting, gestural drawing, and contemporary art. The exhibition The Experimental Self. Edvard Munch’s Photographs, which she curated, is currently traveling in Europe and the U.S. Berman is now at work on a book about the politics and visual culture of the sun tan. Tom Gunning has published widely on early cinema, and on the culture of modernity that generated it. His book D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (1991) traces the ways film styles interact with new economic structures in the early American film industry and with new storytelling tasks. His latest book, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (2000), deals with the systematic nature of Lang’s oeuvre and processes of interpretation. Gunning has also written extensively on Avant-Garde film, genre in Hollywood cinema, and the relation between cinema and technology. The issues of film culture, the historical factors of exhibition and criticism, and the spectator’s experience of film are recurrent themes in his work. MaryClaire Pappas is a PhD Candidate at Indiana University specializing in modern European Art, with an emphasis on Scandinavian paintings, prints, and drawings. Her dissertation, “Imaging Modernity: Modernism between Norway and Sweden, 1910–1924” focuses on the discourse of modernism occurring among Norwegian and Swedish artists in the early twentieth century. Pappas holds a master’s degree from Queen’s University and has previously worked on the Catalogue Raisonné project for Edvard Munch’s drawings. Research for her dissertation has been funded by the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, the Einar and Eva Lund Haugen Memorial Fellowship, and the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence in European Studies.