Other co-workers at Ateljé Uggla were Sten Didrik Bellander,  Johan Rönn, Lars Epstein, Bo Appeltofft, Kerstin Bernhard, Hans Gedda and Mats Burman. Hassner befriended Hammarsköld and Bellander who were both a little older than he, and at 21, he traveled to Paris where he took photographs for his first book Parispromenad, published in the following year.

Cover, Sven Aurén, Rune Hassner. Parispromenad. Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand; 1950.

These may have been amongst work he exhibited with Hammarsköld and Bellander in an exhibition organised by Lars Wickman, editor of FOTO magazine, Unga fotografer at the Rotohallen in Stockholm in 1949.

Also included in that show were Astrid Bergman, Ellen Dahlberg, Sven Gillsäter,  Tore Johnson, Hans Malmberg, Lennart Nilsson, Lars Nordin and Tor-lvan Odulf. Their revolt was against styles they saw as hopelessly outdated and unimaginative against the rapid development of imagery in Europe and the USA that they feared had bypassed the entire Swedish industry.

It was a deliberate challenge to the practitioners of Pictorialism, like amateur Gösta Hübinette,  which then prevailed in photography club competitions and exhibitions and whose celebration of a romantic national pride during the Second World War in neutral Sweden the ‘Young Photographers’ as ‘Rosenlunderiet’ after an old peoples’ home in Stockholm.

It was enough for Hassner, so while others in the group returned to their commercial careers in Stockholm, he and Tore Johnson left for Paris, and there freelanced for eight years undertaking reportage and press work, specialising in the subjects of culture, politics and fashion.

They haunted the streets and bistros for likely subjects and on one occasion Johnson, resting his camera on a table, and with a slow shutter captures Hassner leaning into frame as he cautiously shows his Rolleiflex to an eccentric-looking man in a café who responds volubly. Markets and street vendors, fairs, stations and abattoirs provide further material for young men with the high ideals that leaven Hassner’s writing he was beginning to have accepted into photography magazines.

In a 1951 issue of the magazine Fotografisk årsbok he wrote:

…values, lines and tones scattered on paper by optical and chemical means or processes; that’s all really that photography is [ but ] you don’t have to use cheap tricks or things that hit and miss to make good pictures; despite all the aesthetic means of expression and subtleties, honour will always be given to the one who with the camera dares to go on the attack against violence and oppression, who dares to poke at habitual thinking and falsehood [ . . . ] The photograph that gives voice to human freedom, to the values of freedom, to humanity will always be valuable, even if it will not be accepted as great photography in aesthetic connoisseur circles.

Appropriately, in 1949, his dramatically shadowed view of a wrecking crane, apartment building, sky and hoarding represents this struggle for freedom. It includes one poster emerging from encroaching shadow; Jacques Nathan Garamond‘s design for the UNESCO‘s Rights of Man exhibition at Musée Galliera, October to December 1949, commemorating the first anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December 1948, intended ‘to bring this Declaration home to the man in the street.’ Influential producers of photographs, photo magazines and exhibitions of the time; LIFE Magazine, the photo agency Magnum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the UN provided images for an innovative display that can be seen as a precursor of MoMA’s The Family of Man. UNESCO had started using exhibitions for mass communication beside its photo magazine Courier, in which Hassner work appeared, and UNESCO’s own radio shows.

There is a poetic, symbolic element to Hassner’s street photography of this period, as if learned from Ferlin’s Sachlichkeit literary imagery, evident in the  tree that seems to spring hope from the foundation of the shattered, vandalised vintage gas lamp.

Elsewhere there is comic relief in colliding contents of his composition, as he divides it for example in Wind and Hats between the ordered world of cobblestones, kerbstones, mosaic masonry and bustling besuited bureaucrats, and that of unruly spikily branching nature above which imposes visible force on the scurrying figures.

Sometimes his glancing lens picks up a coincidence verging on the surreal; the bandaged foreground figure’s double-take—beneath an elaborate awning inscribed ‘Grand Parisian Shooting Alley’—at the incongruous presence of nuns on their way past a sign advertising horoscope readings and another which seems to read  ‘here we baptise them by the minute’.

Few of his photographs are posed, among which is Hassner’s portrait of Christer Strömholm, ten years his elder and who in the 1950s was becoming a practitioner of street photography. At fifteen, in 1933, he had been in the Nazi Nordic Youth, before switching at 21 to the Swedish Volunteer Corps and the Norwegian resistance. After aimless postwar years in Paris his discovery of photography, at around the time of Hassner’s sympathetic portrait, led him to associate with Otto Steinert‘s Fotoform and ‘subjective photography’, before becoming disenchanted with that and deciding he must return to photographing people, but to find a way to engender their trust in him and to avoid exploiting them.

His solution was to live with his subjects for a time. At the end of the 1950s, Strömholm encountered the transgender women of the Place Blanche; rejected and isolated by society. Photographing their lives over subsequent years he engaged with their social and medical problems. He only exhibited his pictures of them much later in Stockholm in his first solo show in 1965. This approach became a cornerstone of his teaching.

At 26, Hassner’s street photographywas published in Camera magazine in 1954, with a commentary in which he discussed his love of making candid images in the city environment, his technique and motivation;

For these photos I used a Rolleiflex, ultra-sensitive film, often ordinary developing paper to get details even in poor lighting; camera set at 3m, exposure usually ½ sec and aperture 5.6 or 8; I carried the camera around in my hand, always with one finger on the trigger, and often snapped immediately without consulting the viewfinder. As long as you carry the device inconspicuously in your hand, you can get very close to people without them reacting [ . . . ] Tired of working in the studio with the camera on wheels, with a lot of lamps, with large format negatives, retouching and smiling for the public, the opportunity and freedom to observe the real face of the people on the street drew me

While his observations on the street are clearly empathetic and heartfelt, and often full of human pathos, Hassner was perhaps then either too reticent and too much the dreamer to have constructed from them a photo roman like the legendary Love on the Left Bank by red-haired and hot-headed Dutchman Ed van der Elsken, nor a book with a thematic narrative like Tore Johnson’s more targeted and dramatic photographs, however stereotypical, in his Ökante Paris (“Poor Paris”) of 1954, which is given structure by Ivar Lo-Johansson’s chapters.

Not long after their arrival in Paris Hassner and Johnson staged this double self-portrait, sitting dejected on a doorstep with their enlarger and boxes of photographic paper, apparently using a saucepan as a begging bowl. It hints at their different personalities.

In an address in February 1973 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, in a panel ‘Photojournalism: A Matter of Life and Death’ with Richard Olsenius and R. Smith Schuneman in conjunction with the exhibition Margaret Bourke-White: Photojournalist, he remembered;

In fact, some of [us] first tried to work together in twos, but those efforts were not successful. They found that two people working together were either too many or too few. Those who lived like camera vagabonds then began to grow tired of the often failing quality in their work because of incomplete or worn out equipment. They no longer saw the charm in lacking sufficient money to buy more than a roll or two of film at a time. Nor did they enjoy printing their picture stories with second hand enlargers in cheap hotel rooms where the bed bugs would creep over the enlarging paper during an exposure! Many negatives stored in traveling bags or shoeboxes in Paris, Rome and other cities disappeared and were damaged. We found that unlike wine, a stock collection of negatives filed in a cellar did not grow in quality as time passed.

Those who stayed at home to work in studios or for magazines also faced difficulties. They became more and more involved as businessmen and studio managers with less and less time for so-called free and creative photography.

He also was compelled to support himself with advertising work; very capable location photography of ‘New Look’ fashion using the skills he learned in Winquist’s studio who himself had assimilated in the forties the then little known Richard Avedon‘s idea of venturing onto the street with his models.

In their travels, the co-exhibitors of the 1949 Unga Fotorafer would cross paths and discuss collaboration, but it would be a decade before any such partnership happened.

In the meantime, over 1953/4 Hassner completed a rollicking journey across Africa with writer Olle Strandberg to Algiers, across the Sahara, Niger, Cameroon, French Equatorial Africa and the Belgian Congo, Nairobi in Kenya, Rhodesia and South Africa, to Madagascar and then Sudan and Egypt to photograph for Strandberg’s 1955 book Jambo means Hello.

It was later reissued by Houghton and Miffin and by international publishers, with his African pictures being included in other publications. While Hassner’s imagery is friendly and warm-hearted, clearly colonialist curiosity over the exoticism of its subject societies provided a viable market.

In December 1955 he flew to New York and then, in February 1956 to Hawaii to work there as a stills photographer on a documentary film production, and in June traveled in Central America via Puerto Rico, and to India, USA, Asia and photographed even here, in Australia, though his archive is too sparsely scattered to retrieve those pictures.

He was also a member of photo agencies who distributed his photojournalism; a photograph, from October 1956, of barricades in Budapest during the Russian invasion appeared in a November 1956 LIFE magazine is credited to ‘Rune Hassner from Gamma,’ and elsewhere ‘Black Star’ appears with his by-line.  Recognising him as a significant documentary photographer, the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet awarded him for his photography in 1957.

Hassner’s experience of working with agencies may have been the prompt that inspired him on his return to Sweden in 1958 to became one of the founders that year of the professional collective, based on Magnum, called Tio fotografer (‘Ten Photographers’) with Sten Didrik Bellander, Harry Dittmar, Sven Gillsäter, Georg Oddner, Lennart Olson, Hans Hammarskiöld, Hans Malmberg, Tore Johnson, and Pål Nils Nilsson, and their subsequent photo agency Tiofoto, created in 1959, exactly ten years after the Unga Fotografer exhibition which had included the majority of them.

Speaking in 1968, he described its arrangement as a producers’ cooperative in which all were freelancers, responsible for themselves, but sharing labs, offices, knowledge, experiences, services and dreams. Each paid $150 a month to cover basic operating costs, and was charged cost price for prints or film processing in a central lab operated by Tio staff, from which any profit contributed against general expenses. Sales from stock files had 25% deducted for operating costs. The monthly fee decreased as lab production and sales from stock files grew. At his stage they were setting up a colour darkroom for transparencies increasingly required by publications, with one member having gained a scholarship to be trained in colour in the USA;

Apart from sharing the common costs, each member is entirely his own entrepreneur [there no women in Tio]. He may want to earn a fortune in advertising photography, or he may work on a noncommercial long-range documentary project. He may paint, film or write books. As long as he pays his monthly share, he remains a member of the group. We believe this personal liberty in combination with a basic sharing of common services, costs, and equipment is a practical solution to getting such a special community as ours to function with the least possible friction.

Tio fotografer took care of invoicing, tax compliance, accounting and insurance, and funds were reserved for independent or speculative documentary projects. It was a forum for the exchange of ideas and critique, and they acted as one on the vital issues of the profession.

There was an official professional organisation of photographers across all its fields in Sweden for both employers and employees. Tio felt it couldn’t serve the special interests and needs of magazine photographers who were also lecturing, writing, and editing it had become a wholesale image dealer offering any magazine similar material from a dozen competing freelance photographers, which if accepted would not be given a credit-line.

“Communication is a word which should not be applied to this kind of image commerce […] at TIO we have decided not to involve ourselves in this system of wholesale international distribution of photography. Instead, we are trying to enter into more personal contacts with exclusive representatives both in Europe and in the U.S. […] Our aim is to produce completed units of communication, whether the unit is a magazine story, an illustrated book, an exhibition or a documentary movie film, even if this goal sometimes may limit our chances to see the unit published.”

As the international picture magazines which had sustained his practice were displaced by television, Hassner, like others in Tio, moved into film after 1965, in his late thirties, for which he used a lightweight, often handheld, 16mm camera as a continuation of his style of photo-reportage. In 1966 he filmed and co-directed Myglaren, with Jan Myrdal, considered by his detractors to share, in his choosing what he called ‘a big life,’  the ruthless ambitiousness of the eponymous main character played by Christer Strömholm whom Hassner had photographed some fifteen years before in Paris. Myrdal, a Marxist-Leninist and anti-colonialist drawn to Maoist-style Communism, lived amongst his subjects for years in Afghanistan, Iran, and India as Strömholm had done with the transsexuals.

Myglaren, a political satire made for TV in black-and-white, was hailed as a success and entered the Swedish language as a noun ‘myglare,’ meaning “any person who advances his or her own interests through scheming.” In 1971 Hassner contributed to the founding of the left-wing journal Folket i Bild/Kulturfront edited by Myrdal and in 1978 they collaborated on six films about China for Swedish television.

The medium also served Hassener’s increasing interest in the history and theory of photography in his documentary series on the history of mass-produced photographic art Bilder for miljoner (‘Images for the Millions’) started in 1969 and extended to still more episodes, an exhibition and book emphasising the socially critical function of photography, and as a political weapon. He produced an English version for the School of Journalism in the University of Minnesota.

In the 1980s Hassner initiated and headed Sweden’s first university course in photography, was founder/head of the Hasselblad Centre in Gothenburg 1988-94, for which he wrote monographs on practitioners such as Jacob Riis, André Kertesz, Lennart Nilsson, Susan Meiselas, James Nachtwey, Josef Koudelka, William Klein, Rolf Winquist, Tore Johnson, and the FSA, and was advisor and contributor to histories, anthologies, magazines and festivals of photography.

Happy the one who reaches the destination of their youthful dreams! But this trajectory was one able to be followed only by those born some time before WW2, given the political and economic structures, and radical changes to media that we see emerging late in Hassner’s career, while the handicap of geographical isolation has all but vanished.