Magnus Nilsson; grazing reindeer from Nordic: A Photographic Essay of Landscapes, Food and People
Herring and hard cheese are having a moment. All over the world, restaurants and pop-ups have opened with sensibilities rooted in the great outdoors of snowy Scandinavia. Pläj in San Francisco, Luksus in Brooklyn, Tumble Swede in Seattle and The Bachelor Farmer in Minneapolis (to name but a few) are all part of what’s been called the New Nordic movement. It’s a movement that shows no sign of abating. In fact, the New York City subways are about to get a taste of the fjords when a vast and ambitious Nordic food hall opens in Grand Central Terminal.
Where did it all come from? From top chefs such as Copenhagen’s René Redzepi and Sweden’s Magnus Nilsson, the superchef behind Fäviken Magniset, a restaurant in rural Sweden near the central border with Norway that San Pellegrino ranked as the 25th best restaurant in the world in 2015.
If you haven’t heard of Nilsson, here’s your brief: He’s sensible and down to earth yet glamorously woodsy, known for catching the trout that hours later will be on the dinner table and sawing the marrow bones of old dairy cows in his dining room. He was one of the stars of the PBS series The Mind of a Chef. He has two hugely influential cookbooks under his still-young belt (he’s 32): one on his restaurant food titled Fäviken and one that’s a definitive portrait of Scandinavian home cooking—all of it—called The Nordic Cookbook. Shockingly, Nilsson’s experiences during three years of traveling through the diverse parts of Scandinavia to research The Nordic Cookbook, from the remote Faroe Islands to bustling Copenhagen, inspired him to branch out into a new creative path: photography. A breathtaking show of his landscape photography is touring the United States, landing at Seattle’s Nordic Heritage Museum from March 17 to May 8 and at the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis from June 2 to August 14. The exhibition is accompanied by a stunning museum catalog, Nordic: A Photographic Essay of Landscapes, Food and People.
We caught up with the Swedish food star to ask how he came to take such a visual turn.
GRUMDAHL: How did you add professional photography to your résumé?
NILSSON: I never think I’m a professional photographer. I never have to go out on assignment and come back with the shots. But I have been photographing for a long time. [I got] my first camera when I was 6, a Kodak Instamatic I found in my grandparents’ cupboard. I’ve been taking pictures ever since—and I get lucky sometimes.
What happened [to create the cookbook] was that I thought I knew the Nordic region quite well because I’ve had a special interest for a long time in the foods of the region, yet when I began traveling a lot in the Nordic countries, my eyes opened gradually. It wasn’t until halfway into the research of the book that I realized how much diversity there really is. And how much change is happening. I’ve spent a lot of time in Norway; we’d go on vacations there as a kid, driving and camping. But, you know, from when oil was found there until today, it’s like another country.
When I was little, we used to go [from Sweden] to Norway to buy groceries because it was really very cheap, and today, it’s the other way around. There’s been such an accumulation of wealth there so quickly. What’s unique with Norway is that this change, it’s happening now. Certainly, it happened in England, in Sweden, but it happened a longer time ago. Today in Norway, there’s an unbroken thread to many traditions—of food, of fishing, of so many things. It’s not a fairy tale, but some people know the old ways.
So, photography for you started with a documentary impulse, to catch Scandinavia as it is, before it changes even more.
Yes. I think I’ve always had a good eye for what’s pleasing and provocative; that’s important when you work with food. In some ways, I don’t think restaurants are so different from photography. All the photographs were shot with the specific purpose of documenting something—an occurrence, a cultural occurrence or a moment—and then at the same time, they are aesthetically pleasing or aesthetically interesting. You happened to add a layer of something more on top. It’s the same with the restaurant. The product starts as food, as experience, but you add other things on top of it—interest, excitement, novelty.
Will you continue photographing going forward?
Yes. It’s important to travel, to look around a little bit and to understand how your place in the world fits in with everything else. I do think it’s very important to take the time—and I think this applies regardless of what you do—to expand your point of reference and just expand your creative toolbox by seeing more things and collecting more experiences. It’s funny because the travel was all begun for the purpose of producing the book, but it fed back into the creativity of the restaurant much more than I ever expected. When I look back on it, it seems, of course, natural that those three years of travel would feed back into the rest of life, but I hadn’t expected travel to help me so much better understand work I thought I knew so well.
Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl is a five-time James Beard award-winning food and wine writer. Her work has appeared in Gourmet, Saveur and many other publications.