Updated soon.

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.