This fall I operated on my knee and was on crutches for a while. After a couple of months I was walking again and began taking regular walks to build up the strength in my knee. It wasn’t long before I started seeing pictures and I couldn’t just let them go unrecorded. I didn’t want a camera that you had to take too seriously and decided to take my old Mavica out of mothballs. It’s been under the back seat of our Volkswagen bus for 7 years so the battery isn’t in the greatest of shape, but otherwise it works fine.

In May Karin and I were meeting with old friends in Helsinki. I wanted to photograph some mannikins as I always do in a foreign city. I tried to make it quick and convienient by borrowing a bicycle and riding around looking for mannikins to photograph. Then later I would go back and photograph the most promising. I took ”memory shots” with my digital camera and I later went back and photographed this one with my Rollei and black and white film as I usually do. 

However I don’t seem to be able to mix digital and analog and color and black and white in the same session. I don’t like the black and white picture at all, most likely because when I took my first shots digitally I started thinking in color. The color shot works all right, but the mannikin series is supposed to be in black and white.

We have a cabin in northern Sweden, on a bluff over the water. When we do the wash there we hang it over a line outdoors to dry. The line is outside with bushes and trees all around so there are lovely shadows on the trees when the light is falling on the sheets and just as lovely silhuettes behind the sheets as the sun goes down and lights the sheets from behind. So I have gotten in the habit of, on sheet day, following the sun all afternnon and evening. I use my Rollei and film, 12 pictures to a roll. Not many in this digital world but taking few pictures requires more concentration than taking many.

On March 3rd, I had an exhibition at the Photographic Society of Uppsala. The exhibition was intended as an ending to my career as a photographer and consisted, among other things, of my "Gåvobilder" the pictures that I gave away at the end of each course as thanks for the course. I wanted to close the circle of my teaching with the exhibition and exhibit the pictures the students received over the years. I did a big fuss in the newspapers about it, something I don't usually do. I made the fuss because I wanted the word to get out to all my former students, sort of an informal reunion. 

It was fun. Lots and lots of people and former students came. One girl who was in my first class in 1973 showed up. Then she was a girl of 13, now a woman of 53 (and she still looked the same!) Two fellows from class number 2 came also. They hadn't seen each other in about 20 years and were glad to meet again. I had planned this to be my last exhibition ever, but got talked into one by a former student to have one in Söderhamn in January of next year.

I chose this picture as my last “gåvobild”, a last present to all my former students who showed up at the exhibition. It is from my magic garden in Germany, “Zaubergarten” and was taken during a visit last May, 2011. I had received a Diana F+ as a present and could for the first time photograph my garden at night. 

I have, for the most part, always worked in project form, working my way through a specific subject or form of expression. Most, though not all, of these have been presented in the form of exhibitions. Some have become books. I just sent off my latest book for publication so maybe it’s time to make a little summary of the photobooks I have published so far.

July 1980

July 1980 was my first real project and became my first book. During the month of July, 1980 I photographed and kept a diary every day, in a sort of stream of consciousness manner. I purposefully did not think about what I was doing, nor did I make any  plans from one day to the other. In the fall of 1980 I went through the photographs and the writings and tried to make a “little package” out of them. The book was published by BILDiBOK in 1987.

Loretta

I discovered that printing books is expensive and I didn’t have any money to print any more for a long, long time. 

Then in 2007 I received a little stipend to prepare a course in on-line book publishing. I thought there would be no better way to get the experience and the teaching materials than to publish my own book. I took as my subject "Loretta", a collection of poems and photographs from WAY back, the early sixties. I had everything ready, I had first collected the material together in its final form back in 1978, but then of course, there were no easy and cheap printing methods.

I was quite pleasantly surprised. Though BILDiBOK’s quality was better, it was not better by much, at least with these kind of pictures. The book is published in/at www.lulu.com and some of it can be seen here: Loretta. You can see some of it (in lousy resolution) if you click “preview”.

Digital books are great! Not only is the quality amazingly good, you can order just as many as you want or need. I’ve still got boxes and boxes of “July 1980” in the basement but only about 7 “Loretta”. When I run out of those seven, I just order more!

Me Just Me

In 1998 I was in a European project of selfportraits. We took a selfportrait on the last day of every month and in 2001 we had the grand opening in LeMans, France. It was great fun to take part and I made many friends. In 2008 I got the idea that maybe we should do it all over again "Ten Years Later". Two of the LeMans crowd, Alain Langlais and Martine Leonard jumped on the train and off we went. It was quite a change for me: a picture every day and in color and digital no less! Just to make it more fun I used an old Sony Mavica.

Now I was in the world of digital pictures and the Internet. I edited the pictures as I went along and sent out weekly pdfs on a regular basis. Therefore, when the end of the year came round I immediately started the layout for my next book “Me just Me” It was my first book with Blurb and I’ve stayed there ever since. http://www.blurb.com/b/4633636-me-just-me You can see the whole cotton-picking book if you click the orange banner “preview book”

Grated cheese and breadcrumbs

Loretta is primarily a poetry book with pictures. It is the first of a projected series: “Grated cheese and breadcrumbs”, “Tuesday afternoon”, “I gotta go back to L.A.” and maybe one or two more, we’ll see.

I just sent off “Grated cheese and breadcrumbs”, that is, after having ordered and checked one book, I ordered ten more. It’s really nice if I say so myself! Look at it here: (http://www.blurb.com/b/2709984-grated-cheese-and-breadcrumbs). You can preview it also.

HOWEVER: Don’t buy the books through Lulu or Blurb. Why? Because I can never let well enough alone and I make changes to the books after I get them home to me. I take out pages, I put on a cover, I even cut off a centimeter of “Grated cheese and breadcrumbs”. If you want a book ask me and I’ll send you one. I’ll even sign it if you like!

I have a long-going project of mannequins, most of them taken on travels. I guess I’m getting old but I don’t think it’s all that much fun anymore to lug my Rolleiflex around all the time. Since I have started scanning in the mannequin negatives and printing them out in 50X50 cm I thought maybe I could just skip the middle man and photograph them digitally So this is a test: one of these pictures was taken digitally in September and the other on film in May.

Our summer cabin lies equally distant between a peninsula looking out over the ocean and the mail box. This summer I got the idea for a little project "On the Road", taking pictures as I walked to the one or the other. For many reasons I work primarily on film with manual cameras. However for my self-portrait project I have been using a digital Mavica, a bit primitive maybe, but fully automated. But I felt "on the Road" just HAD to be taken with my 6X9 camera that I hadn't used since photographing "Summer 1981". As I started walking down the road the thought struck me that I was asking a lot of a camera that had lain dormant for 27 years. No fear, the camera performed flawlessly, though the same could not be said of the cameraman. Brainwashed by my digital camera I forgot to take the exposure, and when I did that I forgot to set the shutter speeds and f-stop and when I did that I forgot to advance the film!