My first transatlantic crossing was in 1966. My mother, Solveig “Sissi” Ina Andersson (later Anders), and I traveled from Los Angeles to Trollhättan. What remains from that first trip are not clear scenes but blurry fragments. A room. A bed, or perhaps a sofa bed where my great-grandmother Selma was resting. Me, standing nearby, trying to understand who this old woman was and that we were related somehow.

The route itself: a DC-8 from Los Angeles to Winnipeg, on to Greenland – Søndre Strømfjord, Kangerlussuaq – then Copenhagen. From the Danish capital onward to Göteborg in a Convair CV-440 Metropolitan.

Perhaps that was where it all began. Not a decision, but a condition. A low, steady pull to new places, new experiences.

Someone recently called me restless. It’s not a new diagnosis. It tends to come from those who have chosen stillness, or had it chosen for them. From people who could and should travel but choose not to. It’s hard for me to relate to lethargy. Life is already far too short for me to allow procrastination to determine my destiny.

For me, movement has always carried meaning. The mild disorientation of arrival, the spontaneous conversations, negotiations with the unfamiliar, the demand to stay alert and at the top of my game – all of it sharpens something that everyday life gradually dulls. I feel more present when I’m away. Less inclined to drift. Focused. Inspired. Creative.

I’ve come to think of it as my “Happy Island” theory. Always having something ahead – a place, a departure, even a modest shift in scenery – makes the in-between mundanity easier to carry. The routines, the obligations, the parts of life that resist change and have that gravitational pull that some love and others resist.

These days, it doesn’t have to be far. Marseille or Vänersborg. The scale matters less than the direction. The act of going is enough.

I took the image above while waiting for a train to Cannes at Marseille’s station. Another pause. Another transition. Exactly where I tend to feel most at home. On the road to somewhere.

A few minutes in, along the water, and I’m no longer just on the Côte d’Azur. The air – that mix of salt, sun, and something faintly urban – lands almost exactly like Venice Beach. Not identical, but close enough. Close enough that the body recognizes it before the brain does.

Palm trees spaced just right. Light bouncing off the water and the buildings across the coastal road in an all-too-familiar way. Temperature sitting in that perfect sweet spot. I just run.

Right now, Cannes is quieter, more composed. Less show. But the signals are there. And suddenly I’m running two coastlines at once – south of France and southern California, stitched together by pace, breath, and memory.

Geometry doesn’t lie, and it’s readily available in both urban dwellings and organic environments.

It’s just there – in shadows cutting across a facade, lines meeting, in patterns that appear once you look beyond the obvious. That’s the moment I’m currently focused on.

Geometric photography isn’t just simplification. It’s more about revealing or discovering patterns, intersections and interesting overlaps. Stripping away the noise and letting structures and shapes speak.

Sometimes all it takes is a wall, a corner, a shadow at the right time of day. The rest is mindset and perspective.

There’s something therapeutic about focusing on geometry. Discovering where lines will fall into place. Watching the world reduce itself to form, rhythm, balance.

There’s something quietly relentless about going through an archive of one’s own work. Not the glamorous part of photography. Not the travel, not the moment of capture, not even the finished image. Just me, a screen, and tens of thousands of files staring back, asking to be judged, thrown away or tweaked.

I’m currently working my way through roughly 40,000 RAW images. It’s slow, methodical, and at times tedious. Frame by frame, deciding what stays, what goes, and what might have been overlooked the first time around. There’s no shortcut. I just sit with it.

But somewhere in this repetitiveness, something else happens.

I start to see some images differently.

Images I archived years ago suddenly open up again. A slight change in composition makes what felt off before now feels deliberate. A moment that seemed ordinary now carries weight. And with the tools I have today in Lightroom and Photoshop, there’s also the possibility of giving certain photographs a second life. Not by reinventing them, but by adjusting them – closer to what I actually felt, at the time.

Getting rid of the duds is also part of the process. It clears space, both literally and mentally. It sharpens the overall body of work. I’m not just editing images – I’m editing my own history.

And then there’s the unexpected part: memory.

Going through these files is like reopening doors in my head that I forgot existed. Trips, assignments, places, people. Details come back in fragments – the light, the temperature, the pace of a city, the reason I stopped to take that particular shot.

It’s not nostalgia exactly. More like reconnecting with earlier versions of how I saw the world.

This image is from Venice, shot during an assignment in 2009. It shows the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore, sitting quietly across the water from the more crowded parts of the city. There’s a kind of restraint to it – the clean geometry, the pale façade against the deeper tones of brick, the vertical pull of the bell tower cutting into an otherwise calm sky.

Venice often gets reduced to chaos and crowds, but moments like this reveal something else entirely. Space. Balance. A sense of stillness that exists just outside the obvious.

At the time, it was one of many captures. Today, it carries more context. More clarity. Not because the scene has changed, but because I have.

That’s the strange reward in all this. What starts as a cleanup becomes something else entirely – a recalibration. A reminder of where I’ve been, what I’ve seen, and how my eye has evolved along the way.

Here’s an inverted version of Humlebæk train station, which is located near the shore of Øresund and just a few minutes’ walk from the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, where Elle, Charlotte, and I spent most of yesterday afternoon enjoying the world-class exhibits, the excellent shop, gorgeous surroundings, and delicious food. We make a cultural pilgrimage to this world-class destination at least once a year.

Friday. Evening. Gothenburg.

Took the early milk run north through the country, from the south coast to the west coast. Spent most of the train ride writing, largely offline.

Grabbed the train’s sturdy conductor to explain that there was no way to get online.
Oh, so the Wi-Fi is down? The stressed conductor asked, his expression failing to hide my inconvenient observation.

No, the Wi-Fi is fine – full strength, I replied.

So what’s the problem then? came the inevitable follow-up question.

In my most pedagogical tone, I explained that Wi-Fi and the internet are two entirely different networks. That you can have perfectly functioning Wi-Fi, but if it isn’t connected to the internet, it’s utterly useless.

I might as well have been speaking ancient Egyptian. The distinction – or the dependency between the two – didn’t sink in. To the conductor, Wi-Fi and the internet are same-same. Not different.

The meeting with Fredrik von Zweigbergk at the Gothenburg Museum of Art went much more smoothly. He was happy to receive “Abandoned,” which he has purchased to sell in the museum shop. And soon my book of abandoned places will also be available at NK in the capital. Alongside Akademibokhandeln, Bokus, Adlibris, and of course, Amazon.

This could have been from the Shinkansen trip between Osaka and Kanazawa, or Kyoto to Osaka last fall. Hard to say. Not important.

What stayed with me was the bento box. 

Not just because it was neatly packed and thoughtfully composed. Clean lines, balanced colors, a quiet attention to detail. Soft rice, crisp pickles, something glossy, something firm – each food item placed with intent rather than convenience. For my visual pleasure. And now yours.

And then there was the taste.

Fresh, precise, and deeply satisfying without trying too hard. The kind of meal that does exactly what it should, nothing more, nothing less. The ultimate lunch that gives energy without putting you to sleep.

Bought on the move, eaten somewhere between two cities at high speed – and still better than most sit-down lunches I’ve had in recent memory.Filling, thoughtful, and unexpectedly affordable. No wonder I haven’t had any Japanese food since last December…

Urban landscape photography has always felt like a contradiction that somehow makes perfect sense. The genre sits right at the intersection of structure, chaos, permanence, change and dilapidation.

Once established, most cities are built to last, yet they’re never finished. Something is always being torn down, rebuilt, repurposed, or abandoned.

What draws me in is not always the obvious postcard view, but the in-between spaces – the less obvious. The overlooked spiral staircase where light hits a rounded facade just right, like in the image above which also has an interesting symbolic angle to it.

To me, urban landscape photography, at its best, is less about documenting a place and more about investigating it. I’m not just capturing architecture – I’m capturing time.

A city reveals itself differently depending on the hour, the season, the weather, even my own state of mind. The same block can feel completely different from one day to the next.

There’s honesty in urban environments. Nothing is staged, yet everything is part of a mostly unintentional, often changing composition.

Lines, shadows, repetition, decay, symmetry – it’s all there, waiting. The challenge is not finding a subject, but learning to see what’s already in front of you.

It becomes a way of slowing down in places that are inherently in a rush. A way of extracting and archiving something quiet and reflective from environments that are anything but. And in doing so, preserving fragments of cities that might not look the same next month – or even two days from now.

Yesterday, I delivered “Abandoned – The Beauty in What Remains” to Malmö Konsthall. Even after all these book projects, I still get a rush of pride seeing my efforts “in the wild” at a bookstore. It makes the entire journey feel so tangible and real.

When I hold the finished book, I can feel the moment I boarded the plane, the weeks spent capturing a place, and the time spent back home curating and refining the work until it was ready to be included in a book.

It’s an exhausting, exhilarating process – but seeing it in a store, ready for someone to buy and take home or give away, makes every part of the process worth it. Again, “Abandoned – The Beauty in What Remains” is also available for purchase on Amazon. 

For those wanting to buy from an online bookstore based in Sweden, Bokus now sells Abandoned.