There’s something subtly disorienting about seeing a place you think you know from an angle you’ve never experienced.

This image was part of my exhibition Malmö Upside Down in Slottsträdgården a few years ago. The premise was straightforward – take familiar places and shift the perspective enough that recognition is no longer immediate. Not to complicate things, but to interrupt the habit.

What you’re looking at is no longer just a place to walk, swim, or pass through. It becomes geometry. Lines, intersections, balance. A kind of unintended design that only reveals itself when you step away from ground level.

And then there’s the light.

I shot this from a plane when the sun set low enough to skim rather than flood, edges sharpened, and shadows stretched. The whole structure took on a slightly unreal quality, almost like an architect’s model – reduced, precise, detached from scale.

For those who recognise it, this is Kallbadhuset Kallis – one of Malmö’s more enduring landmarks. The tradition of cold bathing here dates back to the late 19th century, when seaside bathhouses were built as social and health institutions, often with strict gender separation and a certain sense of ritual. The current structure has been rebuilt and adapted over time, but the core idea remains intact: a place where architecture meets the sea directly, without mediation.

I think the historical layer adds something to the image. What looks almost abstract from above is, at ground level, a place shaped by routine – morning swims, winter plunges, quiet conversations in the sauna.

That was the idea behind Malmö Upside Down: not to show Malmö as it is, but to challenge how quickly or slowly we assume we recognise the familiar.

This collage is from last night when we celebrated Valborg in Västra Hamnen, Malmö – one of those rare evenings where everything just falls into place. This image captures the atmosphere along the waterfront, from the Ljudkullarna to the open spaces by the sea, where thousands gathered to welcome spring.

What stands out isn’t just the sheer number of people, but the calm, relaxed mood. Families, students, locals – all sharing the same space without rush or tension. The light stretched late into the evening, the air was mild, and the sunset over Öresund delivered one of those spectacular moments Malmö does so well. As I usually say this time of year, all is forgiven.

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I learned only recently that the plastic surgeon Jan B. Weislander passed away in December 2025. The news arrived quietly, almost in passing, which in itself felt strangely fitting.

For nearly a decade, he was a client of mine, though “client” never quite captured the relationship. I advised Dr. Weislander on how to refine his work as a photographer and photo editor – an unusual but, at least initially, productive collaboration. Much of his photographic work revolved around documenting before-and-after results from restorative surgery, material that formed a central part of his practice’s marketing. The photo above is from one of our many sessions.

In the early years, there was a certain chemistry between Jan and me. He confided many interesting aspects of his life and could be surprisingly candid about the inner workings of his practice. While he obviously brought a surgeon’s precision, I contributed technical know-how and an aesthetic framework. It was a functional exchange from which we both benefited.

Over time, however, the dynamic shifted. What began as dialogue became increasingly one-sided. This was not entirely surprising. In my experience, many physicians – particularly those operating at a high level – develop what might be described as a demigod complex.

Authority, exercised daily and rarely questioned, has a way of distorting proportion. Confidence hardens into unquestionable certainty.

With Jan, this manifested as both unwavering self-assurance and a distinctly holier-than-thou attitude that could, at times, be exhausting. It became harder to meet on equal footing, and eventually our professional paths diverged.

Still, there were other sides. When Charlotte and I were living in Mallorca, Jan and his partner Maria came to visit, and we shared a long, unhurried lunch in the hills above Palma. For a moment, professional edges softened.

A few years later, he generously invited us to his 60th birthday at Kalmar Slott, which he had rented outright. Opera singers, musicians, private chefs – an elaborate, theatrical extravaganza, entirely in character.

What ultimately distanced me, however, was the direction his practice appeared to take. There was a gradual drift away from the restraint one associates with the Hippocratic ethos, toward aesthetic procedures that seemed increasingly driven by financial incentive rather than medical necessity.

Cosmetic surgery occupies an inherently ambiguous terrain. But when the balance tips too far toward commerce, it takes on a more cynical tone – often at the expense of insecure patients persuaded that external “adjustments” will resolve internal discontent and discomfort.

That, I think, was where I lost alignment. Not because the field itself lacks merit or that everything Jan did was cynical – but because the field already operates at a delicate intersection of vanity, societal perception, and money.

And yet, looking back, it feels reductive to define a person solely by the arc of their later choices. People are rarely that linear. We are, all of us, shaped by our talents and our blind spots, our discipline and our excess. For a time, our paths ran parallel, and in that overlap, there was a genuine exchange of knowledge.

Perhaps that is what remains. Not a final judgment, but a recognition that even imperfect collaborations can leave something of value behind – if not in the work itself, then in the clarity they eventually bring.

This is Vadstena Castle, from my first visit to this part of Östergötland a few days ago. There’s no denying the scale or the design – it’s impressive. But standing here, it also feels almost oversized, out of proportion with the relatively small town around it.

I’ve read that this imbalance wasn’t accidental. When Swedish king Gustav Vasa ordered the construction in 1545, he wasn’t building a local stronghold for Vadstena. He was making a statement. Placing a fortress like this right next to the Birgittine monastery wasn’t subtle – it was a way of asserting royal power over the Church, marking a shift in who held control over the souls of this country.

Gustav Vasa wasn’t just consolidating power in stone. He also drove the Reformation in Sweden, breaking with Rome and commissioning the first full Swedish translation of the Bible in 1541 – a move that helped place both faith and authority more firmly under the crown.

Right beside this assertion of royal authority stood the legacy of Saint Bridget of Sweden, a 14th-century mystic, writer, and founder of the Birgittine Order. Her monastery in Vadstena had long been one of the most important religious centers in the country, drawing pilgrims from across Europe. The contrast between her spiritual influence and Vasa’s political ambition is hard to miss.

What began as a defensive structure, built to guard against Danish threats, was reshaped into something more refined under Vasa’s son Magnus. That transition is still visible – the heavy, uncompromising stone walls set against the more decorative, almost delicate upper details.

The castle was meant to feel like something much larger than its surroundings, a contained world of its own – built to house a court, soldiers, and the machinery of power near Lake Vättern. Not entirely unlike Göta kanal – a different kind of ambition, but driven by the same mix of vision, labor, and stubborn will.

Sunday. Morning. Fjällbacka.

It almost feels as if we have this quaint fishing village to ourselves, my buddy and fellow photographer Henry Arvidsson and I. Off-season travel is the name of the game.

Last year’s photo adventure took us to Svalbard. This year, we’re on a road trip through some of Sweden’s most beautiful places – Fjällbacka being just one.

Ingrid Bergman loved this archipelagic landscape, and her ashes were scattered in the sea here.

As I passed Ingrid’s memorial a little while ago, I found myself thinking of another Swedish woman with acting ambitions, someone who would have turned 95 today, April 26. Her name was Solveig Andersson and she was my mother.

While Ingrid rightfully became immortal, my mother didn’t. Not even close.

Solveig came from Dalsland, from the farm Moderud in a tiny village with the stark name Järn, outside the town of Mellerud.

It’s been said that you don’t grieve those you don’t love. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to figure out my conflicting emotions for my mother.

I would certainly have liked her to meet Elle, her granddaughter, and Charlotte. I would have wanted to show her that I turned out okay – that my life became better than the odds suggested. That I managed to build a decent life out of what she and my father left behind.

From what I’ve been told, when she was young, Solveig was bright, well liked, and a happy-go-lucky girl.

She was certainly adventurous to leave the relative safety of post-war Sweden to chase a career and life in Hollywood. It resulted in a few minor roles, a handful of television appearances, and not much more. But she tried.

How can I possibly not admire her adventurous nature and audacious goals?

I’m certain she would have understood my need to fill life with travel to places like this.

When she died in 1978, my mother was completely disillusioned, worn down by decades of hard luck, abandonment, and a series of hardships and disappointments.

Since I never got to experience her brighter, happier days, I don’t feel obligated to mourn on what would have been her ninety-fifth birthday.

I do feel gratitude that she existed. Without her dreams, there would be no me, and I would definitely not be standing here appreciating the beauty of Fjällbacka. Also, without Solveig “Sissi” Andersson, I wouldn’t have met Charlotte, and Elle wouldn’t exist.

So rather than mourn, I will celebrate my mother for giving me the gift of life.

Photo of me: Henry Arvidsson

I captured this fellow in Aix-en-Provence last week. I occasionally notice men like him, roughly my age, behind counters, pushing carts, stacking shelves, mopping floors that don’t really need it.

There’s a stillness about these men. Not defeat, exactly, but something adjacent. A kind of withdrawal. And I find myself wondering – not out of pity, but curiosity – what roads led there. Which turns mattered. Which opportunities never came, or came disguised and passed unnoticed. Or perhaps they were never part of the equation to begin with.

I don’t pity them. If anything, I recognize something familiar. As men, we don’t have the built-in structure that something like motherhood can provide. Much of our sense of meaning has to be constructed. It becomes about direction, about proving something – to ourselves, to those around us, to society at large. And when that framework isn’t clear, or never quite takes hold, a certain stillness can settle in.

If anything, I’ve come to understand that life is rarely a straight line. It’s not governed by effort alone. Lives bend under pressure, drift with circumstance, stall under weight that isn’t visible from the outside.

Reaching anything resembling an ambition requires more than will. It takes timing, conditions, and a certain level of self-trust – the belief that something beyond survival is even available, attainable, achievable.

My own trajectory didn’t start with direction. The first fifteen years were uneven, at times fractured. Then something shifted. A loss that opened a door. A move. A reset. From there, a different path began.

Luck is often dismissed, as if acknowledging it diminishes what follows. It doesn’t. It explains it. Opportunity means little if it isn’t recognized. Recognition means nothing without action. But without that initial opening, there is nothing to act on – unless you manage to force one into existence, which I’ve done repeatedly in my role as a freelancer.

So when I see men like the guy above, I don’t see failure. I see variation. Parallel lives shaped by different sequences. And the distance between those outcomes is smaller than it appears.

Back in Sweden again after yet another inspiring visit to the French Riviera. There’s always that slight recalibration when I return – different light, different pace.

Spring is just about to happen here in Malmö. I can feel it more than I can see it. The air has shifted. The light lingers a little longer. Everything is on the verge of opening up again. A few months of respite from the cold, dark and dreary.

After days in Marseille and Cannes, averaging around 20,000 steps, I returned to routine this morning. Spending a little over an hour at the gym felt good. A totally different kind of movement – more deliberate, more structured.

On the way there, this view. Turning Torso rising out of the still water like something both engineered and organic at the same time. Santiago Calatrava’s iconic gesture – a controlled twist, a spine in motion – reflected almost perfectly in the canal below, with puffy clouds as a backdrop.

As much as I enjoy France, and I really do, the culinary side of it comes with consequences. It’s hard for me to say no. Long lunches, late dinners, bread that actually tastes like something.

I give in, repeatedly, and willingly. And while there are gyms and fitness centers, they tend to be either scarce, tucked away, or overpriced. Walking helps, but it’s not quite the same.

So now, back home, the shift becomes clearer. As much as I appreciate the benefits of going to a gym, I’m beginning to like the idea of not depending on one even more. I need to get back to practicing yoga.

Even if daily temperatures are nowhere near what I prefer and what my body yearns for, I feel comfortable knowing that we’re heading into six months of agreeable weather.

I’m not a huge fan of moules frites. There, I said it. Not because it tastes bad – quite the opposite. It’s perfectly fine. Occasionally, even good. But it’s one of those dishes where the effort-to-reward ratio feels… off.

Still, place me at a table where the group momentum is strong enough, and I will fold like a cheap deck chair. Suddenly I’m nodding along, “Yes, moules, great idea,” as if I’ve been craving a bucket of mollusks all week. I don’t want to be that guy – the one who derails the collective decision. Social survival instinct kicks in. I adapt. I comply. I smile. Just like the other night at a local restaurant, where they offered a package of a glass of decent bubbly and three French oysters for about 10 buckaroos.

Moules frites is less a meal and more a small project. It takes time. It takes commitment. It takes technique. You don’t just eat – you work. One shell at a time. Open, extract, repeat.

And this is where I run into problems. I’m a utensils guy. Knife, fork, structure, control. I like my meals to arrive in a state that suggests someone has already done the hard part. Moules frites, on the other hand, hands the responsibility back to you. Literally.

Same with shrimp. Love the taste. Absolutely love shrimp sandwiches. But shelling shrimp? That’s admin. I don’t want to handle my food before I can enjoy it unless I’m cooking it – and I do enough of that not to want to deal with it when I’m eating at a restaurant.

Oysters? Fantastic. As long as they arrive pre-opened. The moment I’m handed a tool and expected to pry something apart, my appetite starts yearning for a steak or a burger.

So no, nothing wrong with moules frites. It’s just that by the time I reach anything resembling satisfaction, I feel like I’ve completed a minor internship in seafood extraction.

Here’s a collage from our Tuesday visit to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. If for no other reason, living in Malmö has the geographical benefit of being so relatively close to Louisiana, as well as having Copenhagen and Kastrup International Airport nearby.

 

I captured this wild red sea bream (madai) at the old fish market Tsukiji in Tokyo which I’ve visited a couple of times. It wasn’t pretty in any conventional sense. The market was huge, wet, noisy, chaotic and smelled exactly like you’d expect a place handling the ocean’s harvest to smell.

Nothing there was staged or polished. Everything was real.

Tuna the size of small motorcycles lay on the tables, being cut with a brute force precision that had nothing to do with show and everything to do with mastery.

As a photographer, it was almost unfair. Everywhere I turned there were layers – texture, motion, contrast. Steel against flesh. Ice, blood, tobacco, sweat. Fluorescent light bouncing off slippery wet concrete. I never had to look for compositions. They were everywhere.

What struck me most wasn’t the scale or the spectacle. It was the lack of performance. Tsukiji didn’t care if I was there. I was the outsider, briefly allowed to witness something that had been running long before I arrived and would continue long after my departure.

Like the old Fullton Fish Market in Manhattan that moved to the Bronx but kept its name, Tokyo’s wholesale fish market has also relocated and been renamed Toyosu.

Somewhere in Americamura – Osaka’s American Village. Street portraits.

No plan. Just walking. Looking. Studying.

What makes street portrait photography work isn’t just about luck. It’s negotiation without words. Distance, timing, intent. Knowing when to step in, when to hold back, when a glance is permission and when it’s a boundary.

In Japan, that balance is sharper. People are aware. Private, even in public. You feel it immediately. Push too hard and the moment’s gone. Stay present, respectful, and allow opportunities to open – if ever so briefly. Like a quiet agreement that lasts a second or two.

After that, you move on. No explanation. No follow-up.

Just another street, another portrait.

By now, I’ve experienced all seasons in Japan, though only in the southern part of the country. Aside from Mount Fuji, I have yet to see snow on the ground or any of the country’s northern alpine landscapes. This shot is from the temple area of Nara, sometime in late October, when the leaves of the phenomenally beautiful Japanese maple trees were transitioning from yellow to red.

During our whirlwind road trip around California, David Pahmp and I were set on visiting at least one ghost town. We arrived at Bodie too late the first day, just as the place was closing. We came back the next morning and had several hours to walk around properly. That was the right way to see it.

Bodie began after gold was discovered in 1859, and by the boom years around 1877–1881 it had grown into one of California’s roughest mining towns, with thousands of residents, saloons, gambling halls, a red-light district, churches, a newspaper, and all the usual stuff a place making serious money would want and need.

People did not abandon Bodie all at once. They left because mining became less profitable, fires destroyed large parts of the town, and by 1942, wartime restrictions shut down gold mining altogether. Today, about 110 buildings are still standing, preserved in what is officially called “arrested decay.”

Not to have at least a few spreads from this beautiful place in the book Abandoned – The Beauty in What Remains would almost be blasphemous.

My book “Abandoned – The Beauty in what Remains” will soon be available for purchase at Göteborgs Konstmuseum. It’s already on the bookshelf at Malmö Konsthall. It’s great to have such a niche book at both cities’ premier art museums. For those of you who aren’t near either place, the book can also be ordered via Amazon here.

I photographed this view last night as Charlotte and I walked back from a restaurant in the “Castletown” (Slottsstaden) district of Malmö. These last few days of warmer temperatures and plenty of sunshine are a clear indication that spring has finally arrived – and not a day too soon. Even my walk to the gym in shorts early yesterday morning was quite pleasant, especially since dawn was just starting to break.

It felt undeniably strange to wander around ITB Berlin – the world’s largest travel trade show – yesterday.

Perhaps that’s why it took extra time to navigate the halls, which this year were once again filled to the brim with happy people and colorful exhibits striving to showcase countries, cities, and inspiring experiences.

At the same time, I’m 100% sure we were all trying not to think about the fact that the man who so desperately craves the Nobel Peace Prize has just initiated a major war – one that risks being long-lasting and devastating for us all. This was most visually striking at Israel’s large but completely abandoned pavilion, and in the almost negligible presence of the USA, where the largest exhibitor was represented by the state of Florida’s minuscule booths.

Anyway.

We clocked over 20,000 steps, chatted with plenty of lovely people in the travel industry, and shared news about Charlotte’s popular site for airline staff. We were met with genuine enthusiasm everywhere; soon, the 240,000 who already follow her Facebook page are bound to grow even more in number.

We also managed to greet the always-cheerful cabin crew at the Thai pavilion and sign up for an upcoming press trip to Azerbaijan.

Our long day in Germany ended, as it should, in a genuine Biergarten with a perfectly prepared schnitzel and cold beer, served by waiters in Lederhosen to the sounds of oompa-oompa music.

Once back at the hotel, the reflections returned: What is actually happening? Why must the world be ruled by angry older men who use religion and cult-leader tactics to trick their populations into believing that theirs is the only right way?

It’s pathetic that these old men refuse to evolve, choosing instead to fall back into that same safe Stone Age mentality. Dumb-asses.

Today will surely be another long day with gallery visits along Auguststraße and perhaps a look into Fotografiska.