Text from the catalogue for the exhibition

Alikeness by Katya Sander, 1997

When Bengt Olof Johansson enlarges his private family pictures up to larger-than-life size, it can come to resemble an intense, almost desperate attempt to conjure the flat pictures out into space. The pictures becomes so huge that they almost board up and cover the room in which they hang, completly so. They appear to have been put up in an urgent hope that they are compelled to take over and render the exhibition room as their room; to transform a picture of a room into a room of a picture. A room where the viewer can wander in and become absorbed in personal memories and histories. The intimate aesthetic and private aura of the pictures are sufficiently indistinct and fortuitous for operating on a level that seems familiar and personal to most (western) viewers. But the architectural transversion from the eternally flat and happily frozen room in the picture into the restless and unpredictable reality in which the viewer finds him/herself is eventually hampered as the viewer physically approaches the pictures. The many small pieces of semi-transparent half-curled paper- as the viewer gets closer and closer the wall. The focus is forced toward the object-like character of the image and its copnstruction as materiality- as opposed to its status as a vehicle of truth; the photographed object recognized as an image.

Katya Sander