Ohlson heeft twaalf foto's gemaakt met daarop Jezus als homoseksueel. Hij is omringd door andere homoseksuelen en op het eind sterft hij aan AIDS. De meeste foto's lijken op bestaande schilderijen over Jezus. Het moraal van deze expositie is dat God van iedereen houdt. Dat het niet uitmaakt wie of wat je bent. Elisabeth Ohlson kwam op het idee, toen een paar van haar vrienden stierven aan AIDS en er een groep Christenen beweerde, dat dit de straf van God was.
Een kritische reflectie over de zin van het lijden vind je via volgende link: Heeft lijden zin?
Ecce Homo was one the most-noticed and most provocative art exhibits to come out of Sweden in the 1990s. It also made the photographer’s name well-known to large numbers of people and played a pivotal role in the development of the imagery used by Elisabeth in her latter works. Inspired by Sunday School posters she saw in church as a child, the photographer also enlisted traditional Christian iconography to determine the choice of colors, the arrangement of people and the dramatic situations portrayed. Paintings by artists like Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Block and Reubens were used by Elisabeth as models during her work, which took place over a three-year period. She shot Ecce Homo with a large-format camera to emphasize the feeling of choreographed, carefully orchestrated scenarios. The people who served as models spent a great deal of time posing, with much attention devoted to the feelings they were to convey or express. This exhibit was shown in Scandinavia and continental Europe from 1998 to 2000.
Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin was born in 1961 in the town of Skara, in southern Sweden. As a small child Elisabeth wanted to become a farmer or archaeologist. Elisabeth, who was self-taught, started to work in 1980 as a free-lance photographer for a local newspaper, and moved thereafter to the West Coast city Gothenburg to work for a metropolitan evening tabloid. In 1988, Elisabeth started to work as a free-lance photographer in Stockholm. She found new clients and inspirations in the
Swedish capital, which allowed her to further develop her artistic imagery. She became known for her ability to quickly, almost magically, capture the essence of an
individual in a photograph.
In 1998 Elisabeth created Ecce Homo, a series of photos which showed Jesus Christ in a homosexual context. This was Elisabeth’s breakthrough. The response was intense and widespread; even the Pope in Rome reacted strongly to her exhibit. In fact, Ecce Homo created an unprecedented debate in Sweden about the power and influence of photos. Elisabeth made history.
Her art photos are often inspired by biblical themes. After Ecce Homo, Elisabeth created Amarous which is comprised of photos of the blind; Four Women, a series about female prostitutes which was shown at Stockholm’s House of Culture in 2002; and finally South Africa - via Dolorosa, a series photos to be shown this year of people infected with the “plague” of AIDS.
Ingela Lind, art critic at Sweden’s largest newspaper Dagens Nyheter, has compared Elisabeth’s photography to the films of the Spanish director Aldomovar. Commenting on the Christian theme in Elisabeth’s work, Agneta Klingspoor of Expressen wrote: “She brought homosexuals into the biblical religious community in Ecce Homo, and in Amarous, the blind were transformed into angels.”
Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin’s art makes people visible who are often ignored or not seen, people who are not considered “normal” by the majority.