Photographic Portraits as Dialogical Contact Zones: The Portrait Gallery in Sápmi – Becoming a Nation at The Arctic University Museum of Norway

Abstract

The point of departure for this essay is a series of eleven contemporary photographic portraits of Sámi people in large formats presented in the exhibition Sápmi – Becoming a Nation (2000-) at the Arctic University Museum of Norway, in Tromsø.1 The photographs were commissioned by the curators, and they were shot by documentary photographer, photojournalist, and filmmaker Harry Johansen (b. 1958). Working mainly as a freelance photojournalist, Johansen, who himself is a Sámi, was developing his photographic practice in the middle of the ethnopolitical uprising that took place in Norway from the 1970s onwards.