what society has decided

photographing joakim

joakim is one of those people that you connect with
without much effort
he is just there being himself
and in his own thoughts
letting you to create with the camera
and capture the beauty of the moment.

irena

"a hanging-artist"
(I photographed Irena last september)

have you?

have you guessed you yourself would not continue?
have you dreaded those earth-beetles?
have you feared the future would be nothing to you?
is today nothing?
is the beginningless past nothing?
if the future is nothing they are just as surely nothing.
[walt whitman]

an actor to be

this young man is from Norway and studying drama at a school in Stockholm. I made these pictures for his book.

photographing Caroline

she is a dancer and she asked me to do some portraits and I thought that the most proper way to portrait her was while dancing ... then, she danced for me..

a sign

Suddenly came today to my thoughts a sign that it was in my room in London while I was studying there. I rented this room from a girl from South Africa while she was on vacations abroad so I had her furniture and everything she had carried from home. between them, she had this sign that attracted my curiosity because it wasn’t just sweet in its naivety but, it told much more than that. It had a kind of warmth and something we all need everyday, a feeling of being part of a community and the necessity of being recognize and acknowledged—the childish figures show what you get when you have a kind gesture.
I felt welcome and home in that room in a house with people coming from different countries and environments, with nothing more in common but the fact that we were design students at the same college.

the sign was made by South African school children, back in the late -80s

no!

and when I saw your face with staring eyes
and drops of sweat running down your forehead
I understood that you were about to tell me something
that I wouldn’t like, that it would change my life
and state of mind for a long time

I didn’t want to see you there
I didn’t want to hear what you have done
what you have to say or what you have to explain
there was nothing to explain anymore

And the only thing that I regretted was, that I believed in you
And that I gave you my love and my self, in a way
so, please, not excuses, not tears, not apologizes
I’ll probably be able to forget but not to forgive...

(photo: from a performance of göteborgsoperan ballet
at vitabergsparken, stockholm, august 3, 2008)

signs grove

like many other things, as soon as you take them off theirs context, become something else. they tell you some other stories, wake your fantasy up. they can even become a work of art as for instance, Duchamp's "ready-made"

["The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. " m. duchamp]

i found these signs by the sea in Helsinki.

a chair

... it reminded me a cathedral,
probably a little bit clumsy, but it had the attraction of a thing that wakes your fantasy up.
It's more than a chair that you can actually sit on, well your kids...I had to take a picture of it because it was for me an example of art expressed through a recognizably shape but not for being used.
(seeing at kiasma's restaurant in helsinki)

the ability to think in a different way

I've just heard this line while seeing a film and I
think that this is what a designer have to have in order

to create new things, to get further limits and trends.
because as soon as trends become recognized and
everybody follows them, they are on their way out, 

they have become old.

in order to be capable to create things that last longer, you need to
put your self outside the boundaries and work crossover disciplines,
because the design principles are the same independent on 

what you are designing.

the greatest thing you can create is the one that can be
perceived as timeless and therefore always contemporary.

(photo: kalle åkesson, 1994. a ceramic bowl with printed
pattern: botvid & fredés)

looking at kiasma

[the term chiasma comes from the Greek χίασμα, which is related to the Greek letter Χ and means "crossing"]




finish design in the lavatory




oil painting by sami lukkarinen
(kiasma—the museum for contemporary art in helsinki)
some of my impressions...july 11, 2008
"beauty is on its way back into contemporary art." milla unkila.

spectator

I was checking the older pictures I have done the last 18 years and i found one from 1993 when I was studying in Copenhagen and we didn't have the same access to computers as now. I worked then pretty much with layered images partially made with a computer and then printed out on transparent papers. I took photographs of my drawings and paintings and then worked by hand, each layer to get the effect of transparency and the special feeling of blur and vanish.

I was mostly trying to put on paper the feeling of being an outsider and a foreigner, what ever I went and was. The feeling of not-belonging nowhere and just being an spectator while life's passing by.

how does it look?

I have been working with images for an exhibition that only exists in the digital world and in my imagination for quite a while till now. I think images and forms and colors almost every minute of the day and despite of my moods, the images I create become calm and quite. They have the beauty of a non-existing G-force. But, once again, I had everything digital and I needed to see if they work on canvas or paper and on a wall;
here you see the result.

fantasies of clay

And I answered that I’m not living but surviving and, that I don’t like it because is nonsense. You told me that, since the summer is already here and everything goes idle in this country, that things are naturally how they are, but as soon as the holidays are gone, things will change for the better.

Well, I just said, the last three years I have been trying to find explanations, candy reasons to convince my self that “after all, tomorrow is another day” but things haven’t change at all, on the contrary they just have become worst and since time goes, I’m running nearer to a dead end. I’m in a suspended time with nowhere to go and I know for the facts that this is really the end.

You ask me if I haven’t think about the fact that almost everyone is just surviving ...well it can be true, of course, but, do I have to accept it? Do I have to continue like this? Is there a necessity in my case? I do not have any hope. I do not have future and nobody who will suffer if I disappear, so the answer is not what to do but, when.

shades of life

I remember standing there by the window early in the morning and just looking down. Everything seemed static, like wen you are in an insulated room; not any sound from outside, just the sounds coming from your inside
—your breathing, your pulse, and you are looking at an empty stage. The distance to the ground made the few people crossing the plaza, tiny little unknown shapes going somewhere. I felt the emptiness of a paused time. I knew that in a moment I’d go down to the streets and work with my camera and even when the silence will be gone and replaced with the noise of a busy city I'll be there behind and hidden by the camera lens not taken part of that life, just watching. I couldn’t move from the window, I couldn’t leave either the feeling of emptiness or not-belonging. I was there but it was just my body that had trapped me and didn’t let me free. Those shades and brittle structures down there, attracted me, invited me to be part of the nothingness...after some years that landscape disappeared, but not with me...

(photo: the plaza between the twin towers,
from my hotel room, new york, 1998)

counting down

The days are gone ...
(That’s what the first thought I had this morning)
The feeling of emptiness had gotten slowly into my heart again.

It is like veils of rain in a summer sunset
Beautiful to see but, you know that they will remind you,
sadness and loneliness.

They won’t become storm,
(They are almost like signs of joy: nature taking care of its garden)
But, they will carry to your mind those moments
When you have been just about of touching joy
But, never, never get there.

The days are gone and what reminds of them
it’s just empty images of what they could have been but weren’t.
Like many pieces of an uncompleted jigsaw
that will never fit together.

I can’t see new days coming.
I can’t see the colors of the rainbow.
Or the sunbeams coming through an open window.

The doors and windows are already closed
—I have lost the key to open them.

cinderella's shoe?

I told you how exiting is to fantasize when you are walking somewhere and you find unexpected things or things that don't belong there. Well, I was this morning on my way home from an early meeting and decided to walk instead of riding my bike when i suddenly saw this high heel lady shoe (I know that you're thinking know that it could be a transsexual's but i doubted because of the size, in sweden drag-queens are extremely tall, ordinary above 185 cm and with 46+ shoe size) and I started to build stories about how this could happen. The shoe wasn't old and today is monday and it seemed like someone had found and hanged it there to be found. But how can you just drop a shoe? Was it because the clock was announced the midnight? Well, hardly, those things don't happened anymore and never in Sweden. On the other hand, we live in a kingdom and there are a couple of princes ... uhm, too much of a fantasy. It was probably just a lady who had too much fun and was running to pick up a taxi home and the shoes were much too tight for having them on ... or, nicer to think that in the heat of the night she was having fun and dropping what she was wearing and just kept a drop of Chanel 5...

a glimpse of life

the sun shining palely at noon on a early spring day
i walk trying to see some signs of new life crawling up through
the died leaves fallen from still nude trees.
some tiny blue flower dare to look directly to the sun
but they tremble with the cold breeze from north
the new season is not yet here but a feeling of
a new life and hope is there growing from dirt
and a yellow shine makes me smile ...

february sunrise

Through my window this morning
so beautiful and quite though with traffic.

missing the colors of the spring

happy valentine's day

i'll be your mirror

I'll be your mirror
Reflect what you are, in case you don't know
I'll be the wind, the rain and the sunset
The light on your door to show that you're home

When you think the night has seen your mind
That inside you're twisted and unkind
Let me stand to show that you are blind
Please put down your hands
'Cause I see you

I find it hard to believe you don't know
The beauty you are
But if you don't let me be your eyes
A hand in your darkness, so you won't be afraid

When you think the night has seen your mind
That inside you're twisted and unkind
Let me stand to show that you are blind
Please put down your hands
'Cause I see you

I'll be your mirror
(reflect what you are)

Velvet Underground/Lyrics by Clem Snide
* click the title to listen

amanhã

Amanhã será um lindo dia,
Da mais louca alegria se possa imaginar
Amanhã. Redobra a força pra cima,
Que não cessa há de vingar
Amanhã mais nenhum mistério,
Acima do ilusório o astro vai brilhar
Amanhã a luminosidade alheia a qualquer vontade,
Há de imperar, há de se imperar
Amanhã está toda esperança,
Por menor que pareça, existe e é pra vicejar
Amanhã, a pesar de hoje,
Ser a estrada que surge pra si trilhar
Amanhã mesmo que uns não queiram,
Será de outros que esperam pelo dia maior
Amanhã ódios aplacados, terrores abrandados,
Será pleno, será pleno
(Guilherme Arantes / Caetano Veloso )

lets have a coffee

well i would like to have one with you.
we never had the time to visit magasin3
when you were here.
I had a caffè doppio there
and I thought of you of course.

...i. e. truth

it is neither technique nor the instrument you use
that makes a work of art become ART.
(picture: the coffee shop's wall at MAGASIN 3, Stockholm)

photographing lars-erik

what's important to you?
(you asked)
...just feel the presence
of that friendly gestalt.

That means a lot to me
independent on the details,
colors or shapes.
I just want to capture an image
... a timeless image.

sources of inspiration

forms
colors
to learn to see behind the surface
how the parts interact with each other
to find the most simple structure
that put them together,
where they find their place
and signification.
I think of that when I design
I want to go to the main source,
to the basics, to the start point ...