Great Danes: Politiken's Per Folkver On Denmark's Photojournalism

How is it that Denmark, a country with a population roughly the size of Wisconsin, has in the past decade produced so many internationally acclaimed, visually sophisticated photojournalists? Per Folkver, picture editor in chief of the award-winning Copenhagen daily, Politiken (one of the PDN Players profiled in this year's Photo Annual) discusses the strengths of the Danish photo community. He also talks about his own newspaper and its support for excellent photojournalism.

What is this Danish photography stuff, people ask me. I think there are four reasons for [its success].

First, some 12 or 14 years ago, the Danish School of Journalism added a line for photojournalism. It's not a photo school, it's a journalism school. What happens in journalism school is that photographers learn to think, and I've never heard of a photographer being worse for learning to think. And of course, they learn how to be journalists.

A second reason is that Denmark is the same size as Hamburg (Germany), about 5.3 million people, and the photography environment is small. In France, Italy, the US, photographers are very competitive. Six of them will go to a paper, all with the same idea. In Denmark we haven't allowed competition to ruin the discussion: We help each other, sharing knowledge, sharing ideas. Fifteen years ago the press photographer association created a conference that would bring the best photographers from outside the country; Salgado has come to talk, Eugene Richards, Paolo Pellegrin is coming to talk.

The will for discussion about photography is very strong in Denmark. If we don't talk about photography, we don't learn. We need to discuss the language of photography. We know there are very few inventive photographers working in the world. We are all standing on the shoulders of Cartier-Bresson, Frank, Koudelka, Davidson, Nan Goldin, but how do we go further?

We know that it is very hard to ask a simple question with photography, but there is a movement now to strip away the levels, to be simple. We are realizing that the slowness of photography is [why it will] survive. We're not breaking news; if you want that, turn on CNN. We have the opportunity to say, maybe we should look further, to look behind this matter, because TV won't do that. That's what will happen when we realize we still need photography. Look at the pictures from after the tsunami. The breaking news is gone forever, but the photos that were taken after it are very important. And they are slow, and they are silent.

The third reason for [the strength of] Danish photography is that it was published. That sounds so banal but it's very important, because you don't know if your