I just came across this image in the Kockums Fabriker archive. I shot it in one of the many factory workshops I documented, most of which have since been obliterated. While it didn’t make it into the book Varvsstaden, all those stickers brought me back to the summer of 1988, when I worked as a dockworker unloading thousands of boxes of bananas in Göteborg’s harbor.

Each box weighed about 20 kg, and I typically unloaded between 1,500 and 2,000 boxes per day — the equivalent of roughly 30 to 40 tons of bananas each shift.

About a decade after that humbling summer job, Charlotte and I moved to Malmö – just as, coincidentally, the importation of bananas also shifted there.