page_title: Karl Lärka
section_title: Karl Lärka as photographer
hierarchical_section_title: Karl Lärka / Karl Lärka as photographer
caption_attribution_description: Fotografi av Karl Lärka, häst och vagn på bygata.
context_page_description: Karl Lärka was one of the more important 20th-century documentary photographers in Sweden. Lärka's prime concern was to document the peasant culture that he understood was beginning to disappear, and especially the culture of the lands around lake Siljan in Dalarna; one with agriculture, forestry and many people with stories about older times. Most of his photography was done from 1916 to 1934, and he combined it with lecture tours about the countryside of Siljan. He also documented many of the stories elderly people in the villages told him and was very active in the Swedish local heritage movement that started in the 1920s. More than 4,200 of his photographic plates are today in the municipal archive of Mora.
context_section_description: Karl Lärka's photographs are characterized by his concern to document a disappearing culture. People, animals, and buildings are portrayed in their own context. The people cultivate the land, work in the forest, build houses, wash clothes, cook, or pose with working horses. He describes weddings, people, interiors, transhumance, and village streets with a great sense of feeling for composition and quality.
  Many of Lärka's portraits are typically documentary. People are portrayed in their daily chores, often in positions and with attributes they chose themselves. They differ significantly from the studio portraits of that time, in which people often dressed up and posed. With his connection to the Swedish labour movement, Lärka was known as a "democratic photographer". He let people decide for themselves what to wear, how they wanted to stand, and whether or not they should smile or not. The documentary work procedure of Lärka is also shown in his recording of older people's stories, a method he combined with his photography.
  During his photographic career, Lärka experienced great developments in photographic technique. In the early days of the 20th century he used photographic plates, like all other serious photographers. He got his first box camera during his time at a folk high school. Later he changed for a larger-format American camera acquired from a retailer who had bought it for photographing thieves in his shop at Sollerön.
  Lärka experimented with mixtures of magnesium and potassium permanganate for flash and did "reverted" enlargements before enlargers arrived, by illuminating photographic paper through the camera lens. Later, when he had access to an enlarger, Lärka copied his pictures onto fine-grain film to be able to show his pictures in his skioptikon (an early form of slide projector) at his lectures.
  The large plates were heavy, and when they were exposed, Lärka was forced to find a dark space and reload. When the first sheet film arrived, his work was made easier and there was no longer any risk that the light would disappear while reloading, which sometimes had happened before.
  One of his cameras was an American large format camera, made for 13×18 in (33×46 cm) plates, equipped with separate shutter (Thornton-Pickard Snap-Shot, 1–1/80 sec), Aplanat B no 4 lens from E Suter (Basel) and separate Waterhouse stop (1:4 or 1:8). He also used three smaller folding cameras for the format 10×15 cm. In later life, when he no longer photographed professionally, he got a modern camera for 135 film and took both color and black-and-white photos.
caption: Village street in Östnor, the doorway of Rombogården to the right. Photo: Karl Lärka/Mora Bygdearkiv.
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