Cannes was to blame, he told himself defensively. It was a city made for the indulgence of the senses, all ease and sunshine and provocative flesh. – Irwin Shaw, Evening in Byzantium (1973)
It was the best of times, it was the best of times, it was the age of personality, it was the age of proficiency, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of great looks, it was the season of light, it was the season of nourishment, it was the spring of hope, it was the sweet life any time of the year when Jesus came to Rome dangling from a helicopter.
The February 1966 issue of Playboy includes an interview with the director of La dolce vita (1960) which starts off like this: “‘You’ve been accused of embroidering the truth outrageously even in recounting the story of your own life. One friend says that you’ve told him four completely different versions of your breakup with your first sweetheart. Why?’ Fellini: ‘Why not? She’s worth even more versions. Che bella ragazza! People are worth much more than truth, even when they don’t look as great as she did. If you want to call me a liar in this sense, then I reply that it’s indispensable to let a storyteller colour a story, expand it, deepen it, depending on the way he feels it has to be told. In my films, I do the same with life.’”
The legendary Kary Herman Lasch (1914–1993) from Prague, Bohemia, was a keen character, a teller of tall tales and trumped-up stories. But the marvellous thing about it is that they were all in some way or another based on true events and actual encounters, which hundreds and hundreds of his best pictures give evidence of: the speciality of his intimate portraits of the stars and starlets of the dolce vita era (and later artists and directors), his considerate and beautiful photojournalism that never circumvented the depths of human life, and his early and much delightful girl photography of the world’s loveliest unknowns.
“He told a lot stories in different ways,” says Michel Hjorth who with his associate Christer Löfgren administer The Kary H Lasch Archive – comprising over half a million pictures from the man’s roughly fifty years in the service of photography – which has been in their possession since 2019. “Kary had to sell his pictures to make a living. He was making good money, but he wanted to have all his pictures published so he told his different stories to different gangs, and they were in turn distorted in interviews. There was a mystique to the whole thing that was building up. To sell his pictures he had to be really sharp, and he was. He could tell any story he wanted. It was all about arousing interest all the time.”
The central piece on the display table at Fotografiska in Stockholm, where the quite sensational Kary H Lasch: The Golden Years is on show (and which later this spring moves to Tallinn for a new arrangement), is a portrait of Lasch taken by Michel Hjorth who was the photographer’s friend and pizza companion (Lasch was a vegetarian so he always had a Margherita) for the last fourteen years of his life. And here’s Lasch, elegant enough for Sweden, in a waistcoat, tie and a light jacket, his legs apart on a sofa, fist clenched, making his best angry face with a pair of mad googly eyes attached behind his thick glasses. “I hate photographers, except for Michel …!!” he has jestingly scrawled on the print with the sort of black marker pen that he always used to border his press photos with. This is the other side of Kary Lasch, the cavorter.
“He was a very serious person,” Hjorth assures, “but outwardly he appeared to be a clown and many people couldn’t cope with the fact that he spaced out as hard as he did. He had a basic character and you can see it very early on in his private pictures from home. At the age of five, Kary lured in the neighbour girl and promised her a cucumber if she stripped naked.” The showcase is merely a brush of items representing Lasch’s extraordinary life, such as a copy of Photography magazine of June 1952, his first international cover; Lasch’s spoof on Life with the “Great Photographer” type of person bragging about his camera gear possessions, and a photo of the BBC visiting him in Stockholm for a thirty-minute special about his alignment with the stars.
Marvin Heiferman articulates in his book Photography Changes Everything that “Photographs don’t only show us things, they do things. They engage us optically, neurologically, intellectually, emotionally, viscerally, physically.” The Golden Years at Fotografiska, oh the show – it’s pure eye candy. Kary H Lasch: The Golden Years is the kind of thing that animates our heads and our hearts and our loins. It carries the joy, knack and profoundness of this man who was one of the most industrious and dedicated portraitists during the high-life of the 1950s and early 60s, the golden years when the movie legends looked so immaculately dapper, as if beyond reproach, and yet so alive and comfortable in their own skin.
“Kary was a wonderful, wonderful friend and I miss him very much. We stayed friends until the end of his life. Now at eighty-four, I still get a lump in my throat remembering that day. Dear Kary, whose talent with the lens was unequalled. And he was admired by great artists like Pablo Picasso,” expresses the lovely France Nuyen via email. Nuyen was not yet fifteen years old when she arrived at the Festival de Cannes in April 1953, riding on a motorcycle with her friends from the École des Beaux-Arts where she was the famed institution’s very own mascotte. She was very shy, strikingly beautiful, and there was not a snapper in Cannes who did not aspire to photograph this remarkable girl.
“As soon as we got there, I was faced with having to hide behind my big architect friends to discourage them. The one who would not give up was Kary Lasch. He was stopping the traffic on the Croisette by pretending that his little imaginary dog was having a poo-poo in the middle of the street, making the infuriated drivers honk and scream in anger. But Kary would not move until his invisible dog had finished and Kary would lift the dog’s tail and clean the little behind with his handkerchief. By then there was a huge crowd of people watching and laughing. Then Kary came up to us and said to me, ’Now that I made you laugh, will you let me take your picture?’ All my friends said yes and I ended up being photographed by Kary Lasch and I was on the cover of a lot of international magazines as ’The Girl on the Beach at Cannes’. Kary went on taking pictures of me during my whole career in Hollywood and on Broadway so I owe him everything.”
There is a picture on Wikipedia from 1978 of Lasch in his very charming and likewise peculiar two-floor studio at Skeppargatan 4 (within sniffing distance from Sweden’s most expensive street, Strandvägen) in Stockholm, holding an Oldenburg-sized red toothbrush. Most of the circumstances about this photographer – who in point of fact was the one with whom Anita Ekberg shared the night after her wedding on May 5, 1956 in Florence – were for sure larger than life. “He was accredited to the Festival de Cannes for thirty years straight. Then you become legendary, and can behave exactly as he did, and he could go anywhere and everybody knew who he was,” explains Michel Hjorth.
“Movies alone could not establish the Festival as a worldwide stage for international film culture but press coverage of ‘events’ could,” argues Vanessa Schwartz in It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture. “At a pivotal moment in American domination of the international film market, the French-run Festival developed an international platform for the world’s films and film personalities. In Cannes, films and their stars had access to an unprecedented scope of publicity, disseminated by the increasingly photo-oriented mass international press. While studies of cultural diplomacy have underscored national chauvinism, rivalry, and the frigid battles of the Cold War, the history of the Festival describes the forging of a collaborative international film culture.”
The first Festival de Cannes opened on September 1, 1939 but had to be revoked after just one screening – it was the morning when the Nazis marched over Polish borders. Two days later the Second World War broke out. The Festival was revived in April 1946 as the world was trying to get back on its feet again. At the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, Lasch lost his good life in Prague, the privileged travelling, the boarding school in Switzerland and everything else. His middle brother managed to escape to London and the stateless Lasch arrived in Stockholm to establish a new life from next to nothing, starting as a window cleaner. His parents and his oldest brother were sent to a labour camp in Belarus where they were terminated thirty-six months later, a wound that Lasch would never recover from.
“Kary was very fond of his mother, they had a strong love for each other. Even as a child he said that she was his best model. I think that he was very original as a child. He knew six languages by heart, it could be said that his talent was complete,” Hjorth reflects. “He was expelled from almost every school that he attended because he made practical jokes that could end up in the most absurd situations.”
“Kary disliked his violin teacher in Switzerland so much that he slammed his instrument on the grand piano, and since then he never touched music – other than listening to Mozart, all the time. He knew everything about Mozart, the family background was like that. I understand that they were surrounded by a musical elite. The family had a summer villa, a big house in Kutná Hora [fifty kilometres east of Prague], and in the garden they had a train that went to a music pavilion. I never managed to find out about the dimensions of that train.”
Lasch was also fanatically fond of girls. He photographed 4,500 natural young beauties that he located everywhere, and he claimed that he fell in love with them all. In the January 1958 issue of the (since-long defunct) American monthly Coronet, there is a story of Lasch finding one of his dreamgirls on a boulevard in Paris, then quickly pulling out a chair from the nearest café to photograph this mademoiselle by the name of Yvonne Monlaur (who had just started her short career as an actress) in the middle of the street. These things had a much deeper meaning than pissing off motorists: this was essentially about the sense of time being paused during the moment when love and yes, yes lust fill your entire being.
“His early girl pictures had a clear sense of style with a compelling aesthetic and there is a graphic sense to it that is very nice. During his first nine years as a photographer, he had a woman who was more than twenty years younger, Lillemor Wredman, and she helped him with everything. They were everywhere. But he was chasing girls pretty much constantly and their relationship ended,” Hjorth elucidates. At times when the Benny Hill/”Yakety Sax”-side-of-the-matter took over Lasch’s photography, libido overturned artistry.
“He got tired of girls pretty quickly, that I realised. They became a kind of consumable and I don’t think that these pictures turned out well either. But when he has something where there is dignity, he was sharp as a tack. He said that he was disappointed in all the chicks because they would always let him down, but the truth is that he was just the same himself. He claimed that he was chronically unfaithful but I find that very strange because I didn’t think that he was particularly sexual. He was more pubertal in sex; his audacity was exceptional. The basis for this is to be elegantly impudent. But he always emphasised that he was very kind and those I have talked with attest to his gentlemanliness.”
“In Kary’s case I didn’t see charisma. He was more what you would call a manipulator, he was cunning but in a very good way. Kary was persistent. When he was shooting you can clearly see that it was a collaboration and that he had a very good, instinctive approach to portraiture. So he was able to capture these moments when the person is present, and not pretending to be present, and Kary is a great example of that. Over the years it became less and less possible for him to get his pictures out because in the 70s everything changed completely. He told me on various occasions that he was terribly disappointed that everyone thought that he only photographed girls when he had such fine pictures as those shown here at Fotografiska.”
During the last year of his life when he was slowly dying from cancer, Lasch was fully engrossed in securing his life’s work. The archive remained dormant for thirty years – stored at the picture and news agencies Pressens Bild and later TT, and was (not ideally) in the possession of a Finnish ex-model who worked as a journalist in Paris. Two books on Kary Lasch’s pictures were published in the 1990s by two of his agency friends, and old and inferior press prints circulated here and there but not much else transpired. Things suddenly began to spin when Michel Hjorth initiated the idea of making a major photobook on Lasch. With the help of the Governor of Turku in Finland, Hjorth and Christer Löfgren managed to capture the entire Kary H Lasch Archive of 21,600 sheets of negatives and unbox this treasure for the world.
Everything in the collection has been documented and digitalised. The pristine prints come with a unique certificate on the back, and with a mobile you are directed to a server in Switzerland where the authenticity is verified. From his early days in Stockholm – when Lasch challenged a photo editor in the Hasselblad store on Strandvägen, and in jest told him that he could do so much better than the editor’s pictures – till the end of his career when he carried out his work in a more hasty and careless manner, much of Lasch’s photography was marked by a slapdash attitude towards the technical side of his profession. He never bothered about things such as using a light meter or developing his rolls in an orderly fashion.
“Since I knew how bad, grey and blotchy the press photos were, I had the idea that we should bring his images up to the highest level that exists today,” resonates Hjorth. “The books from the 1990s have mimicked him in a sense that the reproductions look as if they are from the 1950s. There is such a quality in the material that you have to deal with.” The Golden Years: Photography by Kary H Lasch came out in 2021, and each theme – “Glory and Fame”, “The Years in Cannes” and “Moods and Humour” – is housed in its own physical book with pictures so alluring that they make you feel that there are more songs to be sung and bells to be rung.
It should probably be mentioned, however, that most of what can be read in these books is in dire need of editing. That said, there is a beautiful little piece by Joakim Strömholm, whose famous father Christer thought it would be a better idea for his son to improve his darkroom practices in Lasch’s bathroom (in his home at Brantingsgatan 30) than to join a friend on a ski trip to the Austrian Alps. It was one of those mornings in March 1965 that Lasch knocked on the bathroom door, carrying a tray full of breakfast delights together with the dread of the news brought by the morning paper: the coach with Joakim’s friend had been swallowed by a snowslide and everyone was dead.
“I remember him as kind, generous, mischievous, funny and very considerate,” adds Strömholm in a message. “For a 15-year-old it was like being in paradise, to be among all his negatives and pictures of gorgeous babes and famous actors. In a sense, he probably helped me when I started my own photography. His social skills and friendly forwardness were inspiring.”
In Bring on the Empty Horses (1975), David Niven’s second personal account of his life in films, the debonaire actor writes that “Hollywood was Lotus Land between 1935 and 1960 and bore little relationship to the rest of the world, but it was vastly exciting to be part of a thriving, thrusting ‘first-growth’ industry – the greatest form of mass entertainment so far invented.”
We are back in Lotus Land at Fotografiska, under the guidance of Herr Lasch. “Kary connects with the people he photographs, they feel the warmth when they smile and look at Lasch, he participates in their moment – and you sense it, regardless of age, I think. Equally, it is not a bad thing to experience a bit of a concentrate of the temper of this particular era that continues to influence much of our contemporary range of film, fashion and design,” replies Lisa Hydén, Director of Exhibitions at Fotografiska’s mothership, who has curated The Golden Years show with finesse and a sincere understanding of Kary H Lasch and his photographic flair.
It is easy to nod in agreement when the curator appreciates how Lasch “persistently won his photographic moments through perseverance, humour and mischief but still with respect, and how he as a social virtuoso with refinement had his eyes raised towards a kind of cosmopolitan horizon, despite the rather narrow Swedish confinements that he found himself in. Lasch was moreover street smart, and that is a good thing to be.”
After various attempts to have Kary Lasch shown at Fotografiska in Stockholm without even being replied to, Tobias Röstlund, Head of Picture Agency at TT Nyhetsbyrån, found a new way to unlock these doors when the agency’s News Flash: A Century of News opened at Fotografiska by the end of 2022. “Now that I had managed to meet the right people, I told them about Michel and Christer’s extraordinary work with Lasch’s pictures and the book that they had produced. And this eventually led to the exhibition, to everyone’s delight,” recounts Röstlund. “My ambition from the beginning was simply that more people would be given the opportunity to see his wonderful pictures from another, bygone era since they are worthy of being displayed in a large format, on fine photo paper.”
Lisa Hydén explains that “We chose, out of all the thousands of imaginable possibilities, to keep the selection focus that Michel and Christer had delineated in their book volume, the 1950s and early 60s. Then I wanted us to try to capture a little more of Kary’s playfulness in the exhibition. It felt like a possible way to bring the space a little closer to the feeling of being part of the swirling energy that he seems to have had around him. We tweaked it a bit, and asked our graphic designer at Studio Kunze to create a textual design that retained a basic element of elegance but also energy and merriment. Lasch expressed in interviews that he would have liked to exhibit more but the assignments and time ran faster, so here we had a great opportunity to make an impact and produce his prints magnified and emphasised.”
To hint-hint a bit of Kary Lasch’s star quality: picture a man who goes to Copenhagen to catch the night train to Stockholm because he knows that Sophia Loren is on that train and that he knows that her agent will let him knock on her door at 5:30 in the morning, and that the eternal woman will be delighted to see him again and allow him to photograph her in her black nightie. When Loren arrived in Stockholm (with two other actresses, Silvana Pampanini and Lea Massari) in December 1955 to attend an Italian film festival, she was met by the habitual throng of press photographers running after her railway carriage. There was also only one photographer in the whole world who could have taken the picture of Loren in her Grand Hôtel suite, elegantly posed at the tall window with a crowd outside and the Royal Castle across the water. That’s excellence.
“For foreign filmgoers, between the 1940s and 1960s, Italian female stars were exotic, fiery, passionate, beautiful and adult,” argues Stephen Gundle in Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy. “Whatever connotations they might have had for Italians, for English and American audiences they were anything but familiar girls-next-door and nor were they the sort of artificial product that the major Hollywood studios had been turning out for decades. Before all else, Italian stars appeared to be natural; they offered not the constructed sex appeal of the glamourised star, but a certain raw earthiness that seemed natural and unspoilt. To outsiders, Italy possessed the eternal appeal of an old civilisation and the fresh vibrancy of a country that, for all its problems, seemed basically dynamic and optimistic.”
Fellini had plenty of good things to say in that 1966 interview in Playboy: “I loathe collectivity. Man’s greatness and nobility consist of standing free of the mass. How he extricates himself from it is his own personal problem and private struggle.” We now live in a uniquely senseless time in human history. Graeme Turner in Understanding Celebrity Culture is effectively mild-mannered when he describes the dazzle of today’s imperious meh-celebrities and how they rattle in their cages for any kind of validation: “as the example of Kim Kardashian might suggest, most media pundits would agree that celebrities in the 21st century excite a level of public interest that seems, for one reason or another, disproportionate”.
“Never touch your idols: the gilding will come off on your hands,” cautioned Gustave Flaubert in Madame Bovary (1856). One could only wish that “new” Fotografiska will keep clear of these rattlers with their cold energies who seem to be unable to escape the vacuum of their own personal irrelevance, and whose faces have often enough covered the walls ever since the opening in 2010 with the photographic misrepresentation of Annie Leibovitz. Kary H Lasch: The Golden Years is on the other hand Fotografiska when it spangles.
The stardust of yesterday exudes from lustrous medium- or small-sized prints, framed or frameless, while the soundtrack and the paraphernalia secure the mood in the later years of the 1950s. Here you encounter Gina Lollobrigida in Paris in 1951 after Lasch had placated her green-eyed husband Milko Škofič with a potent notion of “Slavic brotherhood”; wave farewell to Anita Ekberg and Anthony Steel at the Firenze Santa Maria Novella and wish them happy trails on their honeymoon; follow Frank Sinatra to the Gare de Cannes in 1955; play boules with Gene Kelly and some happy Côte d’Azur locals; stay with Salvador Dalí in his pitchforked dream castle in Cadaqués in 1958 – or you can think about the chocolate sauce and the stabbing of Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960) while Anthony Perkins smiles at you.
In his book Glamour: A History, Stephen Gundle expresses how “Bardot struck a blow against some of the traditional canons of movie star glamour. She rejected the costly gowns and rigid formality of previous French stars and instead proposed a casual, yet sexy and glamorous, alternative that consisted of gingham dresses, Capri pants, and striped tops, that were left cheekily unbuttoned. Her imperfect, bottle blonde mane symbolised her casual, carefree manner. In an era when stiffness reigned, she offered a dream of emancipation and an image of unlimited desire. Bardot was hugely successful abroad but highly controversial at home.”
The first time that Kary Lasch photographed Brigitte Bardot was when he met the very young France Nuyen at the Festival in April 1953. The last time that he was close to BB was on the set of Une parisienne in 1957 where he had a small part playing himself (which is not in the film however). It is beyond question that Brigitte Bardot has embodied the Festival de Cannes like no one else, though Lasch found her “a little cheap, and I would almost say vulgar” when he tried to come to terms with her sexiness during the early years of her career.
The most beautiful picture in the show has nothing to do with stars, sunshine and provocative flesh. It is a beauty photographed in an Italian church with Lasch’s woman Lillemor Wredman in the centre of the perfectly composed Hasselblad square, and there is a toned-down holiness to everything about it: to this woman standing at the inside of the entryway in her white blouse and what seems to be a pencil skirt, her posture is lovely; to the soul of the carved stones and the three very different columns to her left; to the light and darkness enhanced by the window opening to her right; to the man in his chair below her who is deep in thought. This is the point of great photography – a heartening portrait of a woman (and an old man) united with the serene vivacity of life itself.
“The last time I met Kary Lasch was in 1992 in Gothenburg at the Swedish Exhibition and Congress Centre in connection with an exhibition of his pictures. And there, between Brigitte Bardot, Gina Lollobrigida and Britt Ekland, was little old me. In the evening Kary was travelling home and I followed him to the Central Station. Kary looked tired, his ever so impish eyes had faded a bit. I asked him how he was feeling and he replied, ‘You see, darling, the geezer is getting a bit old,’” remembers Birgitta Lindberg in Mitt jordenruntäventyr med den berömde fotografen Kary H Lasch (My Around-the-World Adventure with the Famous Photographer Kary H Lasch). “I can still feel his warm hug that night. He never told me that he was seriously ill. Kary died on August 27, 1993.”
In the beginning of the 1970s, Lasch’s friend Gordon McLendon, who owned the well-known Southfork Ranch outside Dallas, sponsored their worldwide adventure during which ten thousand pictures were taken of Lasch’s new young model Birgitta in an endless array of beachwear in Singapore, Sumatra, Jakarta, Borneo, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tahiti, Jamaica, Acapulco, Dallas and Los Angeles, and the famous photographer seemed to have friends or make new ones in every paradise and at every luxury hotel they came to. “Kary was phenomenal at conversing in foreign languages. He would run around like a ferret to make sure that he didn’t miss anything,” writes Lindberg. “I say it again, he was indefatigable! That one person can have so much energy! I don’t get it.”
“Kary also had many other sides,” Lindberg reveals in a handwritten letter. “Deep down he was very vulnerable, sensitive and also lonely. When I was in Stockholm recently for his exhibition at Fotografiska, I visited his grave and saw the simplest tombstone imaginable, it cried out: so lonely. Nothing about him being a master photographer. Nothing. It was painful. Kary H Lasch died alone.”
Baudelaire’s recommendation to the sensitive souls of the world was that “One must be drunk always … If you would not feel the burden of time that breaks your shoulders and bows you to the earth, you must intoxicate yourself increasingly.” Aside from his fondness for Mon Chéri pralines, Lasch never touched alcohol. But the unequalled and amazing way he lived his life was exactly like that, in spite of the fact that he didn’t “score” each time.
In a sweet letter to his favourite model Birgitta Lindberg in December 1977, Kary H Lasch thanks her “for everything that has been and has not been”.
Tintin Törncrantz
Kary H Lasch: The Golden Years at Fotografiska in Stockholm, January 19–April 14 and at Fotografiska in Tallinn, April 19–September 8, 2024.
