Every image begins when you begin to think
I use photography to build thinking machines.
Each image is a visual thought experiment.
They are not made to provide answers.
They are built to explore what happens when ordinary objects temporarily lose their familiar roles and begin to carry human experience.
The real work emerges only when it meets its viewer.
Notes from a Visual Laboratory
I have always been interested in how people create meaning.
I used to explore that by observing people in the real world.
Today I do it by creating images and observing how people respond to them.
For most of my professional life I worked with documentary film, television and visual storytelling. The camera was a tool for understanding how people act, communicate and make decisions.
Today I use photography differently.
I construct situations in which ordinary objects temporarily lose their familiar roles. Not to illustrate an idea, but to discover what happens when someone encounters them.
I rarely know exactly what an image is about when I begin.
The finished image is not the end of the process. It is the beginning of another.
Every exhibition is an ongoing experiment.
Every viewer becomes part of the work.
Still Images, Again
When we returned home in 2015, work resumed at a slower pace. My wife Ellinor, an artist and researcher, began exhibiting her paintings. When a spot opened in a group exhibition in 2019, she suggested that I participate. I showed portraits from the Pacific islands. The response was unexpectedly strong—and something shifted.
For the first time, I began assigning myself projects.
A new line of work emerged, inspired by ideas of memes and replicators. That path, too, was interrupted—this time by the pandemic. But in the pause, I found the light. I became deeply influenced by Harold Ross and his method of sculpting with light rather than illuminating form. I reached out, apprenticed, and began working anew—slowly, deliberately, and with restraint.
That is what you see here.
Still a Beginner
Despite a long professional life, I consider myself a beginner as an artist.
Not out of modesty, but out of necessity.
For me, artistic work depends on not knowing in advance. On listening rather than delivering. Each image is an attempt—sometimes an answer, often a question.
I do not take pictures.
I make them.Jag gör dem.
