The American publishing house Condé Nast – whose magazines include Vogue, Vanity Fair and Condé Nast Traveler – is the world leader in its field. The select ranks of star photographers who have had contracts specifically with Condé Nast Traveler in the last decade include Annie Leibovitz, Brigitte Lacombe, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, the recently deceased Helmut Newton – and Håkan Ludwigson (b. 1948, lives in Gothenburg, Sweden). His name is invoked with particular respect on New York’s trend-conscious, self-absorbed media scene. A respect that Ludwigson has earned through 16 years of successful photography, during which technical perfection and visual brilliance have been the hallmark of picture essays in what is THE travel magazine. The Taken Out of Context exhibition has come about for two main reasons. It is high time that the Swedish public, too, got to see Ludwigson’s visual world, and from a photographic-history viewpoint it is important to show the cross-fertilisation of photo-journalism and advertising photography with the photography-based art developed over the last twenty years. This feature is especially evident now that Ludwigson’s photographs are for the first time being taken out of their traditional context and put up on the walls of the Hasselblad Center. Ludwigson’s photography also shows that the boundaries between the medium’s various genres are becoming increasingly hard to pin down. The exhibition interweaves advertising images made for Volvo with documentary shots made for Condé Nast Traveler. These were created using a visual language that Ludwigson shares with such art photographers as William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore and Thomas Struth. Håkan Ludwigson’s personal influences include the now-deceased colour photographer Ernst Haas. His classic The Creation (1971) was one of Ludwigson’s favourite books early on in his career. Another photographer that he admires is Peter Beard, whose African collages exert a particular appeal. Likewise, the visual aesthetic of the long-defunct German magazine TWEN, which still occupies a major slot in Ludwigson’s pictorial memory banks. "My ambition is to create a personal visual language that lies somewhere between documentary and art photography and classical photography," Håkan Ludwigson explains. In Taken Out of Context, Ludwigson the world traveller ultimately displays a healthily questioning attitude to the global adventure industry that he has helped to create through his visual art. Hasse Persson Curator