Lars Bech Son of Lone

01 · 2000

The crying wall

As a photojournalism student at Berlingske Tidende, Lars walked into the Årets Pressefoto exhibition and found his pictures hanging on the “crying wall”: the wall of images that didn't win. He calls it the worst experience of his life. That same day he decided he would win the following year.

“I went straight back to the paper and said I wouldn't be taking any holiday. Every time I got an assignment, I thought: this has to be my winning picture.”

A year later he won Portrait of the Year: Mogens Camre in a demonic pose, taken in the days after the politician left the Social Democrats for the Danish People's Party.

03 · 2001

Neighbour documentary

“The good stories aren't necessarily in Pakistan or Kosovo.”

So the newly graduated photojournalist turned his camera on his own neighbours in the Aarhus quarter of Langenæs. The result, Langenæs/Århus/Danmark, won several awards and pointed in a completely different direction from the aesthetic black and white pictures of the time.

Swedish photographer Hasse Persson praised how Lars approached his subjects “with humour and humanity”, in a style the art world calls the amateur aesthetic. Carsten Ingemann, judge at Årets Pressefoto, called him a skilled documentarian with an eminent storytelling technique.

05 · Always

Passing it on

Lars has been an external lecturer at Danmarks Medie- og Journalisthøjskole and a member of its examiners' panel for 14 years. He teaches at FOF in mobile photography, camera technique and creative photography, and gives talks on photography and storytelling.

He has also been an outspoken critic of his own trade. In the column series The Big Picture he promised “no sacred cows” about the state of Danish photojournalism.

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