ArtistSwedish
Ewa Rudling
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Ewa Rudling spent much of her life in the middle of things - not as a bystander, but as a working photographer on first-name terms with the cultural and political figures of her time. Born in Sweden in 1936, she made Paris her base from the late 1960s onward, moving through artistic and film circles in Paris, Rome, and New York with a directness that earned her access few photographers could match.
Her career began almost accidentally. In May 1968, Rudling found herself in Paris at the height of the student revolt. She borrowed a camera, went to the barricades at the Sorbonne, and the resulting photographs were published in The Observer in London. That assignment set the tone for everything that followed: a career built on being present at moments others merely read about afterward.
The subjects she returned to most often were the artists, filmmakers, musicians, and intellectuals who defined postwar European culture. She photographed Andy Warhol, Nico on a Paris street in 1972, the director Pier Paolo Pasolini at Cannes, Nastassja Kinski, Patti Smith, Yves Saint Laurent, and the Swedish singer Sven-Bertil Taube, among hundreds of others. She also photographed Olof Palme - a longtime friend - and had a well-known encounter with Ayatollah Khomeini during his Paris exile. Her memoir 'Ar man inte Matisse bor man inte mala' (If You Are Not Matisse, You Should Not Paint), published in 1996, gathered many of these encounters into a book as vivid and opinionated as her photographs.
In 2019, Kalmar Konstmuseum marked her fifty years behind the camera with a retrospective exhibition, giving a more formal institutional acknowledgment to a body of work that had long circulated through books, auctions, and private collections. She continued working into old age - an oft-cited story has her photographing with a plastered arm after being pushed on the Stockholm subway at 85.
Rudling died on 31 October 2024, aged 88. On Auctionist, her photographs appear primarily through Bukowskis and Stockholms Auktionsverk, with subjects including Warhol, Pasolini, Nico, Ted Gärestad in Halsingland, and the graffiti artist NUG. Prices have been modest - most lots settle between 100 and 600 SEK - reflecting the intimate scale of her prints rather than any diminishment of their historical interest.