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The National Portrait Gallery acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and to Elders both past and present.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are warned that this website contains images of deceased persons.

Ingvar Kenne

Citizen

Previous exhibition
from Friday 2 November 2012 until Sunday 27 January 2013

Swedish-born Australian photographer, Ingvar Kenne, captures both individuality and shared human experience in his ongoing portrait project Citizen.

Names not known by Ingvar Kenne
Names not known by Ingvar Kenne

This collection of striking portraits was taken between 1997-2011 across Australia, USA, China, Laos and Papua New Guinea. In Citizen, we meet a nun, prostitute, factory worker, famous actors, tribal members and more. By applying the same photographic parameters and treating each of his sitters as equal, Kenne creates an intimate collective of what he refers to as ‘fellow man’. It is this notion that reminds us that our unique experience of life is something that we all share.

Ingvar Kenne, born in 1965, currently lives between Sydney and New York. He studied photography at the University of Gothenburg and exhibits internationally. Kenne was the winner of the National Photographic Portrait Prize 2009 and a finalist in the 2007, 2010 and 2012 Prizes.

The Citizen portraits were photographed on medium format colour negative film using a Mamiya 6 camera. They have been printed as Type C digital prints. The photographs, on loan from the artist and three from the National Portrait Gallery’s collection, are accompanied by Kenne’s descriptive captions.

27 portraits

1 Baz Luhrmann, 2000 Ingvar Kenne. © Ingvar Kenne. 2 Chris, by Ingvar Kenne. 3 Angus Young, 2003 (printed 2014) Ingvar Kenne. © Ingvar Kenne.

Related people

Ingvar Kenne

Dr Christopher Chapman (curator)

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The National Portrait Gallery acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and to Elders past and present. We respectfully advise that this site includes works by, images of, names of, voices of and references to deceased people.

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