When TT’s news flash sounds over the newsrooms, the journalists know that something big has happened, and they have to drop everything else to quickly get the news out in their own media. For 100 years now, the news agency has delivered fast news to media all over Sweden, and the world – with photographers who have captured countless historic moments. With unique access to TT Nyhetsbyrån’s enormous image archive, Fotografiska can now for the first time show news images from the news agency’s founding year in 1921 until today in the exhibition News Flash – A century of news .
– The selection has been a great challenge for this exhibition, because how do you actually summarize a century of news in a picture? We have chosen to start from the news events that for a news consumer in Sweden had a great impact during that particular period, or which in retrospect proved to be significant, says Mohamed Mire , exhibition producer at Fotografiska Stockholm.
Today, TT News Agency’s image archive contains over 100 million still images: from the very first glass plates to paper copies and negatives, newspapers and graphic material.
– TT is open 24/7 and thousands of images flow past our photo editor’s computers. Together with Fotografiska, selecting 100 years of news in pictures has been an exciting challenge, says Tobias Röstlund , picture agency manager for TT Nyhetsbyrån’s picture archive.
The exhibition shows more than 300 images of the century’s most notable events. Historical events that are immortalized include the fight for women’s suffrage, and World War II, moon landings, sporting feats, natural disasters and revolutionary inventions.
– For 100 years, photojournalists have worked to collect this material while depicting the everyday, the grand and the terrible, sometimes at the risk of their lives. But it is also the coverage of entertainment news, and economic and political events where enormous patience can be required in waiting to capture the moment. We can never do the photographers’ work completely justice with 300 photos, but what we can show is a string of events from history, moments of what we remember and what we reminisce about. A look at our common history, says Mohamed Mire.
