Henry B. Goodwin (1878-1931), born in Munich Germany as Heinrich Karl Hugo Bürgel, moved to Uppsala in Sweden in 1904. After becoming a naturalized Swede in 1908, he eventually anglicized his name to Henry Buergel Goodwin. Henry B. Goodwin will be presented with the exhibition “Vårt Vackra Stockholm” (Our Beautiful Stockholm), and a lecture by Swedish photographer Bruno Ehrs.
Goodwin worked as a photographer and lecturer for Nordic languages at the University of Uppsala having previously studied and graduated from the University of Leipzig. With a stagnating academic career, Goodwin began concentrating more on photography and from 1915 onwards, worked as a professional photographer, opening his own elegant studio “Kamerabilder” in Stockholm. This studio soon became the fashionable centre and meeting place for the countries social elite, even though he was considerably more expensive than his competitors. This same year he made his public break-through with a gallery exhibition, the first one-man show of “camera art” in Sweden and soon gained fame as the country’s foremost pictorialist photographer, his works being exhibited and acclaimed internationally.
Henry B. was deeply interested in the creative possibilities the photographic picture offered. During his time in Leipzig, Goodwin learned bromoil and charcoal-print techniques from the famous portrait photographer Nicola Perscheid, but it was Alvin Langdon Coburn who had the greatest effect on him. Goodwin adopted Coburn’s concept “camera pictures” instead of “photography” and became a defender of Scandinavian pictorialism into the 1920s. On a trip to Germany he became acquainted with New Objectivity, which led him to change styles and find new motifs.
Goodwin died at the young age of 53, suffering complications from a broken leg.
FESTIVAL
Nordic Light
April 23 – 27, 2013
Exhibitions until May 5, 2013
Kristiansund
Norway
