Quick Facts
Biography
Elisabeth Ohlson (born 1961) is a Swedish photographer and an artist. In her works she often photographs representatives of sexual minorities.
Ohlson, a lesbian, is most noted for her exhibition Ecce homo which portrayed Jesus among homosexuals and transvestites. The scenes were modern versions of stories of the New Testament, such as Jesus riding a bicycle in a gay parade like in the Triumphal entry he rode to town with a donkey. With her works, Ohlson has wanted to remind people that Jesus worked with and helped the outcasts of the society. She had the idea when one of her friends died of AIDS in the early 1990s.
The first Ecce Homo exhibition was held in Stockholm in 1998. Later an exhibition was held in the Uppsala Cathedral which the archbishop K. G. Hammar had approved. Later Ecce Homo toured around the world. An Ecce Homo exhibition opened on 3 October 2012 in Belgrade, Serbia, currently the only city in this part of Europe in which an exhibition of Ecce Homo is being held. The exhibit had to be protected by 24/7 security guards.
In 2009, the Swedish Humanist Association awarded Ohlson the Ingemar Hedenius prize for secular humanism.
The Eskilstuna Art Museum held an Ohlson retrospective in 2015, covering her work from 1988 through 2012.