Mikael Jansson: Island Dreams & Swedish Nudity

On Mikael Jansson’s Daria, the Archipelago Series

This year marks the centenary of the birth of Ingmar Bergman, a fact that is unlikely to go unnoticed as there will be Bergman-themed weeks and ambitious projects at Dramaten, which was the famed director’s home in theatre for many years. Despite the oceans of time that have gone by and the vast social changes that have occurred since he made Persona, Wild Strawberries, and The Virgin Spring, it’s as though he never left the scene. His significance for Sweden’s international image, and for Sweden’s own sense of identity in relation to concepts like archipelagos, solitude, beauty, and pain, simply cannot be overstated. We are still living in the shadow of his influence. Did Bergman create this himself, or did he simply possess an amazing ability to capture and summarise it in his aesthetics and idiom, aided along the way by his photographer and aesthetic twin soul, Sven Nyqvist? This is a likely train of thought in an encounter with the pictures in this exhibition.

Like Ingmar Bergman, Mikael Jansson has made significant contributions to our time’s canon of images, and has greatly influenced our views on the ideals and dreams of society during his career of more than 40 years. Although, it should be mentioned, he’s done so in a far more reclusive way. Unlike the older icon, who was a fixture of public life, Jansson rarely appears at bustling social events frequented by models. The similarities are all about other things: refusal to compromise, perfectionism, and steadfastly remaining true to one’s vision, with one’s sights set on the non-verbal aspects of the darkness. And, of course, the Swedish archipelago.

Daria, the Archipelago Series started out as a loosely defined assignment for Andy Warhol’s Interview, a magazine featuring photography and stories. It was for an issue published in 2014, themed “The Photographer’s Issue,” and Mikael Jansson decided that this would be the time for him to make a reality of an idea for a project, which he’d been saving for the right occasion. This was it!

The archipelago has always been a source of inspiration for me. There’s something there that is a part of me. I have a very close bond with nature. I love spending time on my desert island, with no electricity or running water. You fish, you go naked. That’s the kind of feeling I was going for here. You could actually say that these photos are self-portraits, in a way.

Mikael Jansson grew up in a working-class family in Stockholm. His dad was a butcher. But nature entered the picture early on, thanks to his dad’s passion for boats. His summers were filled with boating adventures, often based out of Gålö (“I’ve spent more time in the archipelago than in the city”). For this reason, Daria, the Archipelago Series is a project he cares especially about. The person in the pictures is Ukrainian-Canadian super model Daria Werbowy, a face that has lived nine lives, and set new standards for what makes a face iconic, much like Kate Moss did.

I wanted to do this with Daria, who I’ve worked with a great deal. She had never been to the Stockholm archipelago before, but she has spent a lot of time at sea, including once crossing the Atlantic on a sailing boat. But that’s not all. There’s something special about her. To me, she’s not a model, she has something else, something more personal, that I found significant. It’s hard to explain why you’re drawn to certain people. Maybe it’s just that people who really want to be models tend to become a certain kind of models, while people who have other, more important, things going on in their lives have something more. It’s a character.

The story in Interview also featured interviews with the various photographers who had contributed the pictures. Mikael Jansson chose to be interviewed by his model. Their conversation revolved around another typical Swedish phenomenon, which is also a strong subtheme of the series: natural nudity. In one of the pictures, she is reclining on a boat, holding a magazine in front of her with an ad for the ground-breaking 1967 film I Am Curious (Yellow)(Jag är nyfiken – en film i gult), in which director Vilgot Sjöman and actress Lena Nyman travelled around Sweden interviewing people and asking them about their views on society, injustices, and non-violence. Olof Palme, who would later become Sweden’s Prime Minister, was among those interviewed. This film has come to be equated with the leftist ideals and sexual liberation of the 1960s,  and the nude scenes with Lena Nyman and Börje Ahlstedt, which stirred up controversy at the time, are the most famous sequences in the film.

We talked a fair deal about nudity, and how it’s actually natural, rather than some sexual proposition. It’s just natural! Daria is from Canada, and their views on these things differ a lot from places like the US, too.