Mohammed Shuhada Ali Ahmed, Tuffah, Northern Gaza. From the series Gaza Photo Album, 2009

Kent Klich

Curator Anna Tellgren on Kent Klich’s photographs from the Gaza War of 2008–2009 and the museum’s extensive photography collection.

Anna Tellgren: My name is Anna Tellgren, and I am the Curator of Photography and Head of Research at Moderna Museet.

In 2001, the photographer Kent Klich began traveling to Gaza. He wanted, through his work, to increase awareness of the living conditions in the region.

Over time, Klich has developed a practice of working for years at a time, immersing himself in the lives and environments of the people he wishes to document and portray.

He returned to Gaza in 2009, shortly after the Israeli offensive Operation Cast Lead, and was confronted with widespread destruction. Thousands of people had been killed or injured, homes and public buildings lay in ruins, and tens of thousands had been forced to flee their homes. The blockade further delayed reconstruction, leaving the landscape marked by ruins and daily life in fragments.

In the project Gaza Photo Album Klich has describes what he met, the damaged homes, with traces of broken furniture and personal belongings. With this series of colour photographs in a larger format, he allures us as viewers. Slowly the brutal reality becomes visible to us and we experience the traces left behind by loss and grief.

Klich belongs to an older generation of photographers who, since the 1980s, have worked within the, in Swedish photography, strong documentary tradition, and he has become known for his photobooks about Beth, about children in Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania, and about the street children of Mexico City.

The book about Beth, from 1988, tells the story of a woman living with long-term drug addiction who supported herself as a sex worker. The photographer followed her and her family over many years, creating a series of images in black and white, that are both truthful and affectionate. The series has received wide attention, and it was important for me to include a small selection in the collection as a background to the acquisition of one of Klich’s later projects. A total of nine photographs by Kent Klich are now part of the Moderna Museet collection.

The collection comprises around 100,000 photographs from the 1840s until today, meaning that the entire history of photography is represented. The foundation of the collection was laid in the mid-1960s with the acquisition of the Helmut Gernsheim Duplicate Collection and the Helmer Bäckström Photohistorical Collection. All early photographic techniques are included but is dominated by black-and-white so called gelatin silver prints by both Swedish and international photographers. Since the 1990s, colour photography has become more common, and today digital prints of various kinds are the most common technique.

As part of the Swedish Acquisitions project in 2021, when Moderna Museet was granted additional funding from the Swedish government to support the country’s art scene during the COVID-19 pandemic, it became possible to acquire works by several photographers who had long been on my wish list. One of them was Kent Klich.