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BIOGRAPHY
Claes Grundsten is one of the foremost Swedish nature photographers. He is a highly productive, experienced photographer and an expert naturalist,
well known for his pictures and feature articles from wilderness areas all over the world, especially from the Swedish mountains.
His extensive and inquiring portrayal of this mountain world, which he has repeatedly photographed for more than 30 years now, is a unique documentary
achievement in nature photography, based on his scientific knowledge of the natural history of the mountain world. Claes Grundsten's interests in nature
and photography were aroused, in that order, during his teens.
After military service with the mountain commandos in Kiruna he followed university studies in natural geography, geology, zoology and botany, and in
1978 joined the National Environmental Protection Agency. There he remained for 15 years, making important contributions to the protection of the Swedish
mountains, not least at the head of a major Government Commission on the mountain environment. This made him one of Sweden's leading experts on mountain
conservation and national parks.
As a freelance photographer since 1993 he has published more than 20 books of his own and any number of articles, as well as contributing to a number of
other publications as photographer and writer. There are six of his books in English, National Parks of Sweden (1983), The Laponian area (1997), the
large format pictorial book Sarek and Kebnekaise; Where the Light is Ever-Changing (2001) and the award winning Our Magnificent Wilderness 2002, TREK
2006 and Swedish Wilderness. The Mountain World of Dag Hammarskjöld 2007.
Claes Grundsten sees himself as the steward of a tradition inherited from the pioneering photographers and their successors who in the course of
decades have documented the natural world in Sweden. In this sense he photographs the classical subjects which he is expected to photograph, because
they were already photographed fifty or a hundred years ago and those pictures are included in an ecological process which needs to be continuously
documented. On the other hand he also has to be amenable to the different needs by which he is governed as a commercial photographer, with the market
perhaps demanding subjects which would not be his own first preference.
At the end of the day, of course, he is his own photographer, finding his subjects with classic depiction as his guiding principle and with no
compromising on authenticity. "Leading an outdoor life and participating in nature is important for my photography," he says, and as a travelling
photographer he is always in or on the fringes of his subjects. There are resemblances here to the photographers of the 1870s who, with wet plates
and unwieldy equipment which demanded the utmost exertion, had to submit to the conditions which nature dictated. There is something reassuring about
Claes Grundsten today, 130 years later, choosing to work in a similar way, admittedly spared the technical travails of the pioneering years, but all
the same devoting obvious physical exertion to reaching his subjects, to accessing what he wants to observe and communicate. Once arrived he is an exact
photographer who conveys what he sees, without influencing or changing the subject in front of him, and accordingly the credibility of his pictures can
never be questioned.
Åke Sidvall
(previous Director of the Photographic Museum at the Modern Museum in Stockholm)
Feel free to contact Claes on e-mail at c@fotograf-grundsten.se
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