Viggo Rivad

Viggo Reinholdt Rivad (3 July 1922 – 8 February 2016) was a Danish photographer who started as an autodidact in 1946, and went on to win numerous competitions in the 1950s and 1960s. Around 1960, he adopted his so-called "essay approach", resulting in a series of related photographs, such as Et farvel and Laurits (1971). Rivad, who also earned a living as a taxi driver, was a quiet, dedicated photographer, concentrating on disadvantaged areas and people on the fringes of society. His humanitarian messages were a result of his indignation, and his concern for society's outcasts.

Rivad died in Copenhagen on 8 February 2016 at the age of 93.

Early life Rivad was raised in Nørrebro, one of the poorer districts in Copenhagen. He had had a number of jobs, and had attempted to become both a racing cyclist and a painter, before he began photographing Copenhagen's coffee bars and night life in the 1940s. In the 1950s, with his photographs of the slums of Paris and Barcelona, he developed a reputation as Denmark's leading humanitarian photographic documentarist.

Photographic career In 1946, at age 24, Rivad published two photographs in the Danish magazine "Focus". They looked like stills taken from a movie. One of them, titled "Paris in Copenhagen", was taken beside the Knippelsbro in Copenhagen, with the photographer acting as a model. His ostensibly spontaneous pictures, frequently submitted to newspaper competitions, were often carefully prearranged compositions designed to convey a clear message. This approach was very different from that of most amateur photographs at the time.

Rivad developed the photographic essay, a documentary work often in the form of series of photographs. He had been inspired by the series he had seen in photo books, Paris Match and Life, as well as by the 1957 "Family of Man" exhibition in Copenhagen. His technique often consisted of starting with a few rather subdued images leading up to ever stronger and more exciting ones, before the final culmination. He would frequently change the chronological sequencing, so that his pictures were not so much "pictures of a story" as "a story in pictures". The essay approach also allowed him to delve more deeply into a given topic.

During his career, Rivad produced photographic series on Spain, Morocco, Israel, Mexico, Venice, the Sahara, the Soviet Union, Auschwitz, China, Yemen, Central Asia, Venezuela, Ethiopia, Tunis, Egypt, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba and Denmark.

Awards 1974: Viggo Rivad was the first photographer to be awarded a three-year work grant from the Danish Arts Agency 1985: Thorvald Bindesbøll Medal 2004: Fogtdal Photographers Award