WORKS

“…Silence covers the city as the snow falls. Lights of all colors collide on the walls. New mixtures between red, yellow and green occurs, and the colors dance to the rhythm of the intervals of the traffic lights. The snow founds the open spaces with white and becomes a field that absorbs color. A postseason mood is setting in. The visitors have fled, but the carnival lights are still burning.”

I return to Hakodate. A pandemic has passed and it’s winter. SNOW is part 2 of the Hakodate-project.

For years I’ve returned to Hakodate, Japan, to photograph. I discovered this city by chance when a friend who had left Tokyo moved back north. Most of his generation abandon the smaller cities for better opportunities elsewhere. Hakodate shows the scars of depopulation: whole blocks abandoned in its center, and streets hauntingly empty save for passing cars or trams. By day it feels grey, worn down. But at dusk, when street lamps, neon, and traffic lights begin to glow, the city transforms. In that magical light, in the shadows between houses, life seems to persist; quiet, spiritual, almost fairytale-like.

Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, was for decades obscured and half-forgotten behind the borders of the Soviet Union – to outsiders, merely another anonymous city in the Eastern Bloc. Since the country’s liberation in 1990, the veil has lifted, revealing a place of remarkable complexity: a city and a nation with an original and vibrant culture, yet deeply connected to the West, especially to Poland, with which it once shared a powerful commonwealth.
In Vilnius, I encounter layers of history inscribed in walls, streets, and faces — traces and scars of a turbulent past intertwined with quiet moments of beauty. The city carries its memories not as ruins, but as living textures, constantly reshaping themselves in the rhythm of everyday life.

The project ToYuko, is created around a virtual love story between a man from Sweden and a woman from Japan who never met in real life, although the story also investigate the border between real life and virtuality in a way that becomes increasingly relevant in the light of virtuality currently becoming a growing part of peoples life. The project was initiated in the turn of the millennium, before the appearance of the social networks we are accustomed to today. ToYuko was completed in 2011 with the publication of a book and an exhibition that combined multiple projections of film and still images, multiple sound tracks and installations to mimic virtuality and create a encapsulated disconnected universe in its own right.

Refricater is a series of portraits in collaboration with 60 of Swedens most prominent comic artists. Refricater was produced between 2006 and 2008 and reflects the key players in the field of graphic novels in Sweden during that time. With support from Seriefrämjandet and some of the country’s most renowned illustrators, Järeslätt contacted approximately one hundred of the most interesting artists in Sweden working with visual storytelling, ranging from emerging promising artists to the biggest names. The project was named Refricater, from the Latin word ”refricare” which means reshape or redo.

The inevitable shift of commercial photography from analog to digital was a major paradigm change. To viewers of the images the transformation may appear seamless, but for those working as creators it quickly became clear that they were now working with a new medium with entirely new qualities, possibilities and limitations. It was a challenging professional transition, but it also sparked curiosity about where an image’s representation ends up among all the ones and zeros. How much can an image be reduced and still describe its subject? Can we interpret an image using only our own experience?

Countryside ran from 2003 to 2005. The project set out to rupture the classic documentary reading of landscape photography and to free the landscape from fixed notions of time and place. Working in a postmodern spirit, I deconstructed the image of the landscape and used the view camera’s shallow depth of field and tilting of the plane of focus to raise certain parts of the frame while subduing others—guiding the viewer’s eye much like a painter composes a canvas.

Pleasantville emerged from a series of visits to the Gustavsfält residential area in Halmstad. Around 2003, my parents returned to the city where they were born, choosing a neighborhood of villas and chain houses constructed between the late 1950s and late 1960s. Walking through the area for the first time, I discover clues to my parents’ aesthetic preferences and the visual expressions of the values I was raised with, some of which I’ve been trying to escape. The neighborhood bears the hallmarks of the Swedish welfare state at its zenith. It felt frozen in time, like a museum dedicated to unquestioned Swedish ideals. The experience was unsettling, yet the area seemed inhabited solely by people projecting happiness. And so I began photographing Pleasantville.

The project completed my bachelor’s degree in Photography at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. I explored the possibilities of creating images and landscapes by exposing film solely through moving light sources in a pitch-black void. It was a return to photography’s bare essentials, an attempt to capture the aesthetics of light in its purest form.

This body of work served as my apprenticeship in mastering both the camera and black-and-white medium. While assisting a photographer and learning lab techniques, I spent my spare hours roaming nearby landscapes, experimenting with new ideas, always using the landscape as my primary subject and progressively working with larger cameras. Later, as I relocated to different areas, the series grew to encompass images drawn from across the entire province of Halland in southern Sweden.