Strage Sessions: Anglophilia & Photography

To mark the opening of Martin Parr’s exhibition Short & Sweet, we invite you to an evening diving deep into the Swedish love for all things British through the lens of photography and Anglophilia. Fredrik Strage interviews three Swedes who spent considerable time in England in the 1990s: Pär Wiksten and Christina Bergmark, vocalist and keyboardist respectively in The Wannadies, and Stefania Malmsten, graphic designer and co-founder of the magazine Pop. Using Parr’s images as a starting point, they reflect on their own and others’ love affair with Britain. The evening concludes with a bar hangout at Fotografiska, where Strage takes over as Britpop DJ.

Britpop & Martin Parr

Few photographers have shaped our perception of Britain as profoundly as Martin Parr. His raw colour images of beaches, tea parties, racecourses, social security offices and fish & chips cafés established him as a chronicler of English class society on par with Charles Dickens. Parr rose to international prominence in the 1990s, at the same time as Britpop and Cool Britannia took over the world, and in many ways became a photographic counterpart to that music scene. The connection was later reinforced when Blur used one of his images for the cover of their 2023 album The Ballad of Darren.