Untitled: Le troisième angle, Paris 1970s

Amiteera Birina (née Eva Klasson) made her public debut in 1975 with Le troisième angle (The Third Angle); a collection of extraordinary self-portraits, exhibited at the Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris. The self-portraits have often been described as intimate (but also equally repulsive…) close-ups of the human body in the form of an ‘undulating landscape.’ This way of working from one’s own body was seen as something completely new in photography (verging on art) back then, but was later adopted by artists of all genres, like, for instance, Jenny Saville (born 1970, contemporary British artist and original member of the, so called, ‘Young British Artists’).

In the article/interview ‘Fotofika med Eva Klasson’ (Svenska Fotografers Förbund, 14 May 2013) Oskar Kardemark, MFA Photography (born 1985, Swedish photographer, artist and essayist) describes how Birina created the groundbreaking images (when the 1975 exhibition opened, French newspaper Figaro proclaimed that Birina’s images were a revolution in photography…):

It was in Paris in 1975 that Eva Klasson made history with her exhibition and book ‘Le troisième angle’ (The Third Angle), black-and-white photos taken with simple equipment of her own, usually naked, body. One reason the images were so groundbreaking was that Klasson did not compose them. As she was in front of the camera herself, she could not look through the viewfinder. This gave new perspectives on photography as a medium and the camera as a tool. At this time, the camera was supposed to be an extension of the photographer and the emphasis was on speed and agility. Being able to be a ‘fly on the wall’ and being quick enough not to miss the crucial shot.In Sweden, photographers like Anders Petersen and Kent Klich pointed their cameras at the world and at social structures in society. She describes a different approach.

Birina, herself, told Kardemark during the 2013 interview: ‘The concentration was always in front of the camera, not behind it. Hence the title The Third Angle. But they were not pictures to emphasise myself. Although there couldn’t be any other body than mine in the pictures. For me, the project was about physical awareness.’

In the years leading up to the 1975 exhibition, Birina had lived in Paris for some time, published her work in Populär fotografi (one of the major Swedish photo magazines of the time) and met her future husband Jean-Marc. Birina remembered these formative years in an interview with Pontus Dahlman (‘Eva Klasson - fotostjärnan som försvann’, article in vi, 25 July 2022):

A poet and actor, he studied literature at the Sorbonne and hoped for a revolution. He sang songs to me, showed me places in Paris that no tourist had seen, thought the Eiffel Tower was for les bourgeoisie. I had my enlarger sent down so I could start developing my pictures. And we started working together for different magazines, I took pictures of people in the city and was happy, but damn how tense I felt sometimes. The people around us looked like the cast of the musical Hair. We met Nico, the singer of the Velvet Underground, she was sleeping over at a film maker’s house we knew, taking some strong stuff. I was photographing Romani people in a camp: imagine sitting on a dirt floor with Mother Sara, and they had a TV and a chicken that they were going to slaughter and we were sitting there watching Lassie.

Some time later she brought the pictures from the Romani camps with her when she paid a visit to the National Audiovisual Institute’s sound and image archive. Upon arrival she met an advertising man called Tony Corsin who, after having been shown her file, was ‘absolutely thrilled’: ’He had a yellow Matra Simca, a sports car that he never used to drive into the city, but now he drove me home and said “I think you should photograph yourself”.’ ‘If’, as Pontus Dahlman puts it, ‘there is a defining moment in the history of Swedish photography, this is it’. Birina’s response to Dahlman’s assertion deepens our understanding of her creative process back in 1975:

I started thinking about how to do it. I wanted to get closer to the body and I realised that I could do that by using my middle rings and my flash. Then there was a magnifying effect and a very bright light, which makes the depth of field very large. Concentrate in front of the camera instead of behind it. Turn it towards myself. And then into the darkroom in the bathroom of the apartment there in Paris... and wow! So close and so incredibly detailed.

What Birina describes is, nothing less than, the birth of her first, groundbreaking photo series: Le troisième angle. The rest, as they say, is history. Tony Corsin (the man with the yellow sports car) had a small publishing house, and the photos were turned into an exclusive photo book after which they were later exhibited at the Centre Pompidou:

Le Figaro praised it, I got great reviews. Where does this woman come from? they wondered. And guess who turned up at the exhibition? Christer Strömholm, who came in and said: ‘Hi, I recognise you!’, even though we’d never met; when I was at his school he wasn’t there. Of course, I had been inspired by him in my reportage photography. But actually it was he who was inspired by me. He lay down naked in a stream and photographed himself when he saw what I had done.

It’s easy to understand that even giants like Christer Strömholm (1918 - 2002, Swedish photographer known for his intimate black and white street photography portrait series, particularly his portraits of transgender women in Paris. Recipient of the 1997 Hasselblad Award) were inspired by these powerful pictures. Amiteera Birina’s images in this first suite of body shots were like nothing else on the photo scene. Earlier artists, including photographers, had studied their bodies; but nowhere near this close and uncompromising way.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation