15 February 2017 – 13 August 2017 

Children of their time

From Hallwyl House to Hammarkullen’s “Million Programme” public housing scheme

For four decades, beginning in 1973, the photographer and author Jens S. Jensen (1946–2015) documented life in the Gothenburg suburb of Hammarkullen. He got to know the people who lived there and via his pictures and interviews, and we get close to the young people who grew up in one of the Million Programme’s concrete suburbs. When his work first began, Jens S. Jensen was a newly graduated architect and an important motivation was to make the social structures of society and how the large-scale solutions affected people’s everyday lives and dreams visible and top critically examine them. He also wanted to look beyond the media image of the “suburban man” and give a more nuanced portrayal of both the place and those who lived there.

In the Children of their Time exhibition at the Hallwyl Museum, we got to meet both the young people from Hammarkullen and the von Hallwyl children: Ebba, Ellen and Irma. It was almost a century between the pictures and they showed two very, very different worlds. One where family wealth was created in the flourishing industrialism of the 19th century. The other portrayed children of workers in the structural changes of the 1970s: a world where young people were left to fend for themselves at an early age and where the after-school centre was not only a gathering place for social activities, but also a world where recreational drugs were part of everyday life.

The Children of Their Time [Barn av sin tid] exhibition provided insights into the lives of young children and adolescents in two historical events and social contexts. The contrast also helped to clarify the changing view of adulthood and the demands children face in the family and in the society.