Words By Mark Isitt

“You can’t put your arms around a memory”

 

Johan Ödmann owes it all to God. At age 16 he was confirmed and given a Canon AT-1 for doing so. That was the deal agreed with Mom and Dad – if he could stick the Bible bashing he would be richly rewarded. His parents were probably hoping that a camera would force him out into the fresh air and away from the tinnitus-inducing riffing of his electric guitar. But the result was just the opposite. That camera marked the start of their son’s rapid descent to a suffocating bottomless darkness. Literally.

 

It all began with him building his first attic darkroom at home at Djursholm (a scant 1.5 square metres serves fine if you’re tall and narrow). After which he went off to concerts. A job as a photo assistant kept him economically afloat, but what he lived for were the nights he spent facing the stage and the thrill it gave him tracking his idols through the camera viewfinder.

He snapped everything and everyone. All the time.

 

“The status for rock music photography was mud at that time,” says Johan today. “There was hardly anywhere you could publish your pictures. In the US and England it was different of course, there was more of a documentary spirit there, but in Sweden the rock music journals were mostly content with promotional images. Or else they conformed to ridiculous conditions that only allowed the photographer to take pictures during the two first tunes. I ignored all that. For me part of the fun was to trick them and smuggle my camera in past the guards. Being a true voyeur.”

 

After punk the music scene in Sweden exploded with a host of new bands. The task that Johan took upon himself was to document what he saw, primarily because no other photographer had cottoned on to the importance of what was just about to happen. The Nomads, Lustans Lakejer, the early Imperiet, along with all the international artists who came to Stockholm in the belief that the real world would never find out what they were up to there. There was plenty to feast on.

 

“It was a matter of capturing a moment in time. It was almost a vocation for me; if I didn’t document what was happening then no one – other than us who had been there – would understand. The experience needed to be recorded.”

Or, to quote his favourite, Johnny Thunders, “You can’t put your arms around a memory”.

 

What impresses when studying Johan’s collected production from the years 1980–87 is its overall consistency. One element in this is thanks to the technical: he consistently relied on the same camera (he had bought a new camera, the Canon F-1), he never used wide angle, he always preferred black and white to colour, and he developed his films in a solution which intensified the already prevailing black tones.

Another quality of course is the purely aesthetic. His work is dominated by a strong feeling for the documentary. Just as important as recording the artists themselves was his concern to capture details typical of the time. Paul Simonon’s pilot overall and Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Afghan boots tell us much about contemporary fashion. And the disintegrating acoustic roofing and the patched up extra speakers show that rock music then was still far more underground than big business (something soon to alter). And – if your inclinations are towards the nerdic – who did Thunders borrow that never-before-seen black Gretsch Country Gentleman guitar from?

 

It is precisely this unembellished approach to his work, the impression that all the editing took place in that 250th of a second when the photographer pressed the shutter, this is what heightens the sense of presence. Johan lived literally for the moment. He displayed no desire to add or detract but respected totally what happened then and there.

It’s only rock and roll, hey?

 

Johan Ödmann was born in Stockholm in 1962. His fashion pictures have been published in such magazines as Self Service, Big Magazine, Bon, Dazed & Confused, Exit, Jalouse and Spoon.

 

Mark Isitt, born in 1966, is a journalist and writer from the Swedish island of Marstrand.

1999–2007 he was editor-in-chief for the Nordic architecture magazine Forum and since 2007 has been architecture critic for the Swedish daily, Göteborgs-Posten.

He hosts Stadsinspektionen (SR, Swedish national radio), Grand Designs Sverige (TV4) and serves as expert commentator on Hemma hos arkitekten (SVT, Swedish national television).

In 2019 he won the Swedish Architects’ Critic’s Prize and in 2020 he was awarded the Olle Engkvist medal for "High quality journalism".