Charlotte Haslund-Christensen’s Heroes
We can be heroes, just for one day
David Bowie
Charlotte Haslund-Christensen’s work Heroes is at first sight a monumental mural, a sea of pink pulsing against the white cube of Roskilde’s Museum of Modern Art. Five meters long, two metres high, the work fills the art space, drawing the viewer with its explosive warmth.
Commissioned to celebrate the millennium of the Danish city of Roskilde, Haslund-Christensen chose to photograph 1000 of the people she met in the city during the month she was there. She asked a friend to paint a primitive canvas, an obvious backdrop of the city’s landmark cathedral against a brilliant, puce sky.
The artist rolled up her canvas and started trekking through Roskilde with her Polaroid camera. Like any other itinerant photographer travelling from place to place to find work, she set up on the pavement and in the town square, but also in the station, shopping centre, job centre, hospital, university and police station - plus the local chemical factory. Between which came the streets: outside the local sports club, pub and shawarma bar. Taking picture after picture after picture.
As one approaches the work the rush of colour fragments into a thousand small squares: a thousand Polaroid portraits. Walking along the length of Heroes the immediate and powerfully familiar recognition generated by its Polaroid fabric is superseded by the realisation that what looked like black squiggles a metre back is actually handwriting. The white rectangle of caption space underneath each individual Polaroid is filled by the unique signature of each and every person on the wall. All 1000 of them have written their name, occupation and the date and place: Roskilde 1998.
It is here that the individuals in the crowd of Haslund-Christensen’s city portrait emerge: Students, councillors, shop assistants, accountants, academics, welders, engineers, pensioners and school kids, they’re all here. Signing the work and writing their own captions. From the immaculate copperplate of Erik Hansen (pensioner, 78) to the capitalised scrawl of Elizabeth (aged 5). The mayor, head of police, and company director are here too. At the press of the instamatic shutter the single shot captures a high five, an eyeball avoiding the camera, a smiling face looking right at the lens – and at you and me.
The Polaroids are instant. The darkroom translocated to the streets as a happening, an element of performance characteristic of Haslund-Christensen’s artistic praxis. Meetings between the photographer and the locals and between the locals themselves as they gather holding their own portrait during the five minutes it takes for the image to emerge from the emulsion. People who may have waited on the same platform for years, who know each other’s faces from standing in line talking to each other for the first time, waiting to see each other’s faces emerge, sign their own portrait, and leave their mark. Charlotte Haslund-Christensen takes her title from David Bowie’s song Heroes, where ‘I will be king, and you will be queen’. Heroes is a rewriting of the history of portraiture, questioning who deserves to be immortalised by the artist and put on display in the museum.
The itinerant photographers of the past worked in tourist destinations and resorts at a time when holidays for most were daytrips. Fun and freedom – just for one day. Charlotte Haslund-Christensen offers the people she meets the opportunity to be heroes – just for one day. Her contemporary archive of a single Danish city is a fitting tribute, a monumental mural and a vibrant joy to behold.
Jane Rowley