Week 28 - 2020
Elisabeth Meyer, Ingierstrand, the 1960s. Belongs to Preus museums collection.
Local holiday
This summer we have to be contented with travelling short distances for our summer holidays. However, in this outstretched country of ours you can travel quite far while still be within local borders. The road from Tromsø to Oslo is known as being as far as Oslo to Rome! The advantage of travelling locally is, among other things, that you can communicate in your native language, and there's no need to exchange currencies. And, both good and bad pizza can be found everywhere!
This picture is from Ingierstrand outside Oslo, an area exposed to a much greater concentration of sunbathing people nowadays - nothing like the scattered cohorts of people we see here in this photo from the 1960s. The photographer is Elisabeth Meyer. She usually took her photos in black and white; just like all the other professional photographers did at the time, apart from those working in advertisement or fashion. But Meyer clearly dabbled with colour from time to time, as we can see from this picture. It exists as a negative in our collection. The flag waves in the fresh summer wind; green pines, blue skies and a yellow swimsuit, like a splash of lemon, are all parts of the image composition. It gives us a hint to the way a photographer has to alternate between different mindsets when composing and taking pictures in either colour or tones of gray.