Photo Book Scholarships 2023

The 50 000 SEK scholarship

La Petite Ceinture (violet) – Paris par arrondissement – Jeu de L’oie

By Jessika Thörnqvist & Kim Ramberghaug (born 1975, resident in Rackstad, and born 1973, resident in Trondheim)

This photo book is a captivating and innovative visual novel, whose three chapters explore areas of Paris from the perspective of formal limitations and regulations. A disused circular railway line dating from 1898 forms the starting point for the introductory chapter La Petite Ceinture [The little belt] (Violet). The line was originally drawn on a map in the colour lilac. Jessika Thörnqvist and Kim Ramberghaug located and photographed those parts of the railway that are still possible to access, both above and below ground. In the second chapter, the authors follow and photograph an outward-winding spiral pattern in the city. The shape is drawn from an unfinished detective novel by the Danish poet Inger Christsensen. Anagrams of the name of the arrondissements have been used to position characters on a map of Paris. In their final series – Jeu de L’oie [The Goose Game] – the photographers instead follow an inward-winding spiral they identified on a map of Paris found by one of the protagonists in the Jacques Rivette film Le pont du nord.

The book forms part of a series of works in which Thörnqvist and Ramberghaug – under the publishing name of Lightnin’Howlin’Screamin’ – examine a number of places using similar methods. The approach has links to the situationists’ theories of psycho-geography, which is a method of examining cities by playfully allowing oneself to “drift around”. In the practical hands of Thörnqvist and Ramberghaug, however, the approach expands to become an examination of what the aspects of formal restriction and limitation can add.

In their publication, Thörnqvist and Ramberghaug have created strong, suggestive narratives that are not averse to encompassing an abstract image idiom that obliges the reader to remain in the picture. The results can lead thoughts in the direction of experimental film or ambient music in their way of promoting emotions of voyages of discovery over tangible or fictive places, the unconscious or our own inner selves.

The 30,000 SEK scholarship

Peter Freuchen’s Private Servant on the 5 Thule. Exp. by Lars Dyrendom (born. 1981, resident in Gothenburg)

Lars Dyrendom’s original artist’s book focuses on the role of photography and the archive in the colonial relationship between Greenland and Denmark from a conceptual perspective.

The book comprises two series of photographs from the private archive of the Danish explorer Peter Freuchen. One of the series comprises reverse sides of photographs, while the other presents the front side of the same landscape photos. The photographed reverse sides, with their notes and catalogue references, reveal colonial structures. Places, names of items and identities of the subjects of the photographs are not mentioned unless the people in question are Danish.

In other words, the Inuit people and the Greenlandic items have been anonymised.

In the book, the fold-out pages with landscape images are printed on the reverse side – or perhaps more accurately, the inside, as these pages are bound such that they can be folded out to form a circle that provides a 360-degree horizon. The paper is thin, which means that the photos of landscapes and the photos of the reverse sides intermingle.

The book is part of a major project that focuses on Danish archive collections, put together by Danes who have had various relationships with Greenland. The project centres on the nuances of the “common” narratives, and attempts in this way to challenge the historical basis that maintains Denmark’s colonial relationship with Greenland.

The 20,000 SEK scholarship

Eyes of Sliver by Lotta Antonsson (born in 1963, resident in Falkenberg)

This book showcases several of the themes that have long held prominent positions in Lotta Antonsson’s art – suggestion, symbolism, tactility and blackness – in a seamless, insightful manner.

The photos in the book stem from the analogy between photography and silver, and are taken from Antonsson’s extensive collection of her own and other photographers’ pictures. The work focuses on a number of black/white negatives of women’s hands in close up; hands holding things, wearing jewellery, concealing the face or the eyes. Antonsson writes: “What the hand is doing or outlining seems to create deep memory tracks in our consciousness – and this is what I am aiming to represent through aesthetically seductive photographs and collages.”

In short, there is something lurking beneath the surface. The project highlights the contradictory – almost alchemistic – aspect of silver, which is often associated with light jewellery, but which, in the world of photography, is instead a precondition for conjuring up darkness.

The book will be designed by Camillia Blomgren from the AOKI Design Agency, and will also include a text by art critic and psychoanalyst Sinziana Ravini.

The members of the jury for the photobook scholarships 2023:

Andréas Hagström, Hasselblad Foundation

Jenny Nordquist, Artistic Director of the Landskrona Foto Festival

Cecilia Sandblom, Hasselblad Foundation

Dragana Vujanovic Östlind, Hasselblad Foundation

Louise Wolthers, Hasselblad Foundation

Updated soon.

Photo Book Grants 2021

The 50 000  SEK grant:
Klara Källström & Thobias Fäldt for the book On This Day

Authors: Klara Källström & Thobias Fäldt och Thomas Sauvin
Publisher: B-B-B-Books and Beijing Silvermine
Design: Axel von Friesen & Michael Evidon

The artist duo Klara Källström and Thobias Fäldt’s book On This Day revolves around two archives. One consists of a collection of date-stamped everyday images from Beijing, China, taken between 1985 and 2005. The other archive is the American website onthisday.com, which maintains a daily register of interesting world events – seen from an American perspective. The artists have paired the date-stamped images with events of that day from the website. There is an interesting clash in the combination of the amateur photography archive from China and random events in the west. The book’s design will allude to archive aesthetics and we look forward to an innovative approach to the photo book genre.

The 30 000 SEK grant
Peo Olsson & Johan Willner for the book Heaps, Magic & Science

The project is an innovative, conceptual and visual investigation of an overlooked element in the landscape: the heap. The photographs draw attention to a formal repetition that is at the same time enigmatic and reflects something site-specific – the heap can be created by man or nature, and shaped by the environment, history, economy or politics. The book is like a concentrated exhibition with an innovative design. It consists of three parts, each of which consists of a large folded paper with photographs in a grid. The first is an archive of various found heaps. The next presents series of heaps as sculptural forms and the last shows sketches and investigations of the heap’s character. The purpose of the form is to communicate the materiality, spatiality and narrativity of the pile. The artists will develop the design in close collaboration with the publisher Praun & Guermouche.

The 20 000 SEK grant
Tine Bek Hansen for the boook The Vulgarity of Being Three-Dimensional

In this book project, Tine Bek Hansen tries to escape strict hierarchical structures through a series of aesthetic experiments. The book presents images of shapes that run over, flow, crumble and bulge out. An excess of uncontrolled forms that in the sculptural tradition have traditionally been dismissed as weak or possibly baroque. In all this is also inscribed the man and the human body – the fragile and absurd body. The project is an attempt to portray this on several levels: first in a physical spatial context through the creation of sculptural forms, then in representation through photographs of the sculptures, still lifes and other found forms, and finally through the book’s own form and texture. In this way, the book becomes as much a visual as well as a tactile examination.

The purpose of these grants is to support and contribute to the development of the photo book in the Nordic countries which is a vital part of photographic practice and research.

Photo Book Grants 2020

A grant of SEK 100,000 has been awarded to Eva Dahlman in collaboration with Björn Axel Johansson for the book Kvinnor bakom kameran 1845–1945 (Women Behind the Camera – working title).

Foto: Rosalie Sjöman, I ateljén, 1860-tal,
© Nordiska museet

The role of women in early photography has long been overlooked, despite the large number of women who were active photographers and have been an essential part of the field since the 1860s. This photohistorical book will be the first to cover the contributions of women photographers including portraiture, reportage, fashion, rural and amateur photography in Sweden 1845–1945. It is based on comprehensive research including biographical articles and previously unpublished pictures. This book will be an extremely important volume in the historiography of photography in Sweden. Planned release 2021.

A grant of SEK 50,000 has been awarded to Martin Magntorn for the book Daddy Cool.

© Martin Magntorn

Martin Magntorn’s moving and personal portrayal of his late father is part of a popular contemporary genre that focuses on subjective narratives of the family. This project takes an unexpected turn and presents a private representation in a generally applicable manner. It is just as much about the image of a parent as about the photographer’s father. His own portrait of his father is mixed with pictures from the family album and the flow of images is punctured by objective still lifes of the father’s belongings: his shoes, ties and razors. The narrative is not chronological, but associative, which reflects the nature of memory of a past time. Planned release 2020.

A grant of SEK 30,000 has been awarded to Salad Hilowle for the book Halima om de sina (Halima on Her Own People).

© Salad Hilowle

Salad Hilowle describes his book as “a poetical, fictional documentary that, through pictures and text, tells the story of ordinary people.” It is a family’s story, from Somalia to Sweden, told through photography, archive material and private pictures. It is an intimate portrayal, reminiscent of a diary, of people and places rarely seen in Swedish photobooks. Salad Hilowle also aims to reflect the multifaceted story in the book’s experimental design. Planned release 2022.

Photo Book Grants 2019

Albert Elias Grøndahl

Albert Elias Grøndahl has been awarded a grant of 50,000 kr for his project The City Behind the Forest. Grøndahl was born in 1985 in Denmark. He lives and works in Copenhagen.

Motivation

An exceptionally relevant document of an era close in time, yet soon forgotten. This is an innovative book that combines archival material from Aarhus psychiatric hospital with previous patients’ art and pictures of the hospital grounds, photographed by Grøndahl himself. The selection of portraits of the hospital’s patients has been chosen with great care and sensitivity. This type of medical archival photography is also interesting from a photo-historical perspective. The dummy has been thoroughly prepared with a convincing design. This is an important photo book of high quality, in both artistic and culture-historical terms. Grøndahls choice of materials testifies to the fact that this book has the potential to become a masterpiece.

Heikki Kaski

Heikki Kaski has been awarded a grant of 30,000 kr for his project with the working title Life, but how to live it. Kaski was born in 1987 in Finland. He lives and works in Sweden.

Motivation

Kaski works within an associative aesthetic tradition and portrays contemporary life with a poetically inflected social realism. Kaski fully masters the art of photographic storytelling and his use of editing and design shows photographic language to its best advantage. Brief accounts figure in the larger narrative flow in the form of diptychs, contrasts and unexpected details. His sense of rhythm, form and color makes it all the more important that this material is allowed to take shape in the form of a photo book.

Elisabeth Molin

Elisabeth Molin has been awarded a grant of 20,000 kr for her project with the working title COMFORT 7/32/00. Molin was born in 1985 in Denmark. She lives and works in Copenhagen.

Motivation

The first thing one is struck by is the brightness of Molin’s color scheme, but also a kind of restraint, a concentration in her sense for detail. Her photography tends toward the surreal and her fragmentary segments of the everyday assume an almost tactile quality. Her project concerns the encounter between biological and mechanical patterns and rhythms in an urban environment. The photographs are accompanied by short texts that relect upon human and mechanical gazes, the technology of sight: Eye as camera and camera as eye.

Jury 2019

Elsa Modin, Cecilia Sandblom, Sara Walker and Louise Wolthers, Hasselblad Foundation

Photo Book Grants 2018

Tova Mozard (SEK 50 000)

Alice Schoolcraft (SEK 30 000)

Annica Karlsson Rixon (SEK 20 000)

The Hasselblad Foundation Photo Book Grants 2017

Helga Härenstam – SEK 50 000

Cecilia Grönberg – SEK 30 000

Hendrik Zeitler – SEK 20 000

Skogsbärbranschen – Photo Book Grant 2016

In order to promote these grants and mark the significance of photography books already this summer, we have chosen to award photographer Johannes Samuelsson a grant of SEK 20,000 for his book project Skogsbärbranschen.

Skogsbärbranschen is based on Johannes Samuelsson’s photographs and started as a collaboration with two cultural geographers and researchers at Umeå University: Madeleine Eriksson and Aina Tollefsen. It is about the forest-berry industry in Norrland: about structural organisation, economic circumstances, changes in the countryside, migration and local and global relationships. The project is cross-disciplinary, highly relevant and very original.

Johannes Samuelsson

About Johannes Samuelsson

Johannes Samuelsson is a photographer and artist with a master’s degree from the Valand Academy at the University of Gothenburg. He lives and works in Umeå, Sweden. Johannes participated in the exhibition New Nordic Photography at the Hasselblad Center in 2011 and teaches at the Umeå School of Architecture at Umeå University.