“I ache in the places where I used to play.”

Leonard Cohen wrote that line decades ago, and while I am by no means a huge fan, I have a lot of respect for his art and perseverance.

Even though he was far younger than I am today when he sang it, that particular line drew me into the song. At first, I thought it was mostly about physical pain. Aching knees. Stiff back. Weakening eyes. Shoulders that once carried a load without complaint. There were many risks I took without hesitation. Physical demands I met without resistance. Then one day, I noticed that I was often negotiating with myself.

Can I really deliver this?
Should I take on that project?
Do I still have something to say?
Does anyone even care?

Today, I’m about ten years older than Cohen was when he wrote Tower of Song. But aging doesn’t always begin when you get old. For me, the onset of arthritis invited aging much sooner. Nowadays, I feel debilitating fatigue after a long day, and when I sit uncomfortably, even for just a few minutes, I’m reminded that sciatica never really heals.

And then there’s artistic ache.

The world accelerates. Tools change. AI now generates images, text, and music. I can either complain about it or learn to use it. I can either declare decline or adapt and attempt to evolve. The temptation to romanticize “how it used to be” is sometimes too strong.

Cohen didn’t romanticize.

He didn’t say he owned the Tower of Song. He said he was paying rent inside of it – just like all artists committed to their creative calling. Paying rent means showing up. Continuing. Accepting that being an artist isn’t a title – it’s a responsibility.

You owe it to the gift you have been given to create and to share.

I don’t get to live off yesterday’s work forever. I have to contribute, or see myself drift downward into abysmal obscurity. I choose to work. To revise. To adapt. To endure.

There’s quiet dignity in acceptance. In moving forward. Maybe not as a Shinkansen but as a steam-powered locomotive. Chugging somewhat steadily along, focused more on the here and now than on the past.

As I work on new books, refine writing, curate images, obsess over covers, and experiment with tools that didn’t exist two years ago, I recognize something: my aches haven’t stopped me. Instead, the pain has sharpened me and forced me to focus more on the really important stuff.

If that’s the rent I have to pay with age, I still feel solvent.

The image above is a self-portrait from the book New York City, available for order by clicking here.

I’ve been quietly working on a new book project and, as is usual, once there’s a curated compilation of candidate photographs, I’ll get to work on the layout process by deciding on the cover. I realize that to some, this might seem counterintuitive. But after having produced so many books, it’s become a reliable way for me to get seriously involved in a new project.

After selecting several potential cover designs, I typically ask close family and friends to pick their favorites and if possible, motivate their choice. At this stage, before I am too emotionally invested in a book project, I welcome input with an open mind and heart.

For this book, which documents the four safaris I’ve been incredibly fortunate to experience, I felt trepidation as I chose the cover. As this is a pure photography book, the adage of not judging a book by its cover doesn’t hold up. On the contrary, the cover is going to play a defining role in how well the book performs on a store’s increasingly competitive bookshelf.

Fortunately, my ambivalence vanished once I showed my three finalists to someone with considerably more wit and wisdom than I, who made the final choice feel as obvious as a leopard’s spots – which, incidentally, was one of the alternative cover shots.

If memory serves, this scene was captured when the young rhino (lower right) and I locked eyes. It seemed unintimidated by the jeep I was standing on, nor the long, white camera lens I was wielding.

As my invaluable collaborator (who I’ll assume would prefer to continue enjoying anonymity) pointed out, this could be either innocent curiosity or a brief moment of defiance toward its mother or father, seen further up in the image.

We’ll never know.

That mystery is exactly what made this cover the right choice – unlike the others I had contemplated, which felt far too anticipatory – read: boring.

Now that the cover is set, I have a guiding visual plot that will make the process of narrowing down the book’s compilation of safari imagery much less ambiguous.

I’ve said it before, but it truly bears repeating: finding someone who loves you for who you are – and who, year after year, stays even as the patina of age becomes more visible – is something worth honoring on Valentine’s Day.

It’s easy to talk about love as butterflies or grand gestures. But the kind of love Charlotte and I have shared for nearly 30 years – we met in the fall of 1996 – is something rarer: patience, humor, creativity, and the ability to look past flaws without diminishing the good.

The willingness to listen when I go on and on. To stay when I’m stubborn, sharp-edged, sensitive, or slightly ridiculous. To still want to share the everyday routines, the adventures, and the small details that make up a life.

How lucky I’ve been – and still am.

Charlotte chooses me, again and again, with open eyes and a generous heart.

My Valentine. Every day. All year long.

The above photo was taken earlier today.

What the hell was I supposed to do? Dip my hands into that filthy toilet bowl?

I had just changed trains, grabbed a dozen handles and railings, pressed buttons, and probably touched a fair number of surfaces of questionable cleanliness. So the very first thing I wanted to do – needed to do – once I got on board for my final train ride for the day was give my hands a proper, thorough scrub. Being the optimist I am, I simply assumed there would be warm water left in the tap in the restroom of car 5 on SJ’s high-speed train to Malmö.

For once, the restroom was unoccupied, though not exactly spotless… Foolishly, I didn’t begin by checking whether there was any water in the tap at all. Instead, I pressed the soap dispenser five or six times, filling my hands with rich, foaming lather. I started washing – rubbing and working the soap into my palms, between my fingers, and every crevice and crevasse I could locate. When I felt the soap had reached every tiny crease and corner, I pressed the red button next to the faucet symbol.

Dead stop. Not a single drip or drop.

So there I stood, somewhere between Alvesta and Älmhult, with foaming hands as white as the Småland wintry forest the train was racing through. Since my hands would almost certainly become even dirtier if I dipped them into the bowl, which had probably been clogged ever since the train left Stockholm, I shook off most of the foam, grabbed a few paper towels, and wiped away much of the lather. Then I walked to carriage 6 and queued up as third in line for that restroom instead. After a while, I was finally able to wash off the remaining soap, which by then had nearly dried.

The moral of the story, naturally, is always to check the water before things get too foamy.

When we woke up yesterday morning to a gloomy, snowy, windy Saturday in February, we made two decisions: Charlotte promised to fry up a tall stack of her delicious pancakes, and we agreed that, despite the crappy weather, we’d still make the day as worthwhile as possible. Said and done – we forced our way through the slush toward Malmö Central Station to catch the Öresund train to our nearest refuge: Copenhagen.

I’d be lying if I didn’t tell ya’ll that one of Malmö’s absolute best qualities is its proximity to the ever-inspiring Danish capital. Technically, it’s just a bridge away from what the Danes like to call “dejlige.” We always get a creative boost when visiting Copenhagen. Danish design and aesthetics permeate almost everything – even when the city is mostly covered in a thick layer of wet, sticky snow like it was yesterday.

We had two goals for our visit: to see the exhibition “Japan Modern Poster” @designmuseumdanmark and then to find a decent café on our way back toward Copenhagen Central Station. When my health app hit 12,500 steps, it was time to rest our legs, eat something, and quench our thirst with a tasty beverage. We accomplished all our missions. We eventually got back home again, having navigated yet another heavy snowstorm on the way from Malmö Central.

Today, here in Västra Hamnen, a thick layer of fresh white snow has once again blanketed everything. Time to dig out the big winter boots once more and surrender to this unusually long and stubborn winter.

Captured this earlier today on my merry way home from @fitness24seven where I work out, 5:45-7:00 am most Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The temperature on my phone showed ”only” –3 °C (27 °F), but with the gusty wind, the app also made me aware that it would probably feel more like –15 °C (5 °F). Despite it being so cloudy and me being hunkered down to be as aerodynamic as possible, I still noticed how the sky was ablaze with these amazing colors. So the moral of this post is: sometimes beauty shows up exactly when you’re least dressed for it.

February 1. Is it just me, or didn’t January seem a bit elongated? In the middle of a Swedish winter, when the Baltic winds sweep across the Öresund and the mercury drops to levels that I feel are almost inhumanly cold, most people stay tucked away indoors. But for me, looking out across Västra Hamnen, the chill is just another layer that makes this place so incredibly unique.

Living and working here since 2002 has been an extraordinary journey. When we first moved in, the area was still vibrating with the energy of the Bo01 housing expo. The Kockums Crane still stood as a sentinel of our industrial past – a silhouette that would soon be replaced by the twisting grace of the Turning Torso. Since then, I’ve watched this neighborhood evolve from a visionary “City of Tomorrow” into a living, breathing community that never stops reinventing itself.

Västra Hamnen – A Neighborhood as a Muse

As a multidisciplinary creative artist, my work is often a reflection of my surroundings, and when not traveling, this neighborhood has certainly been a tireless muse. There is something about the way the light hits the seawater and bounces off the diverse architecture that demands to be captured. It’s not like I have a choice.

19,000 Passionate Neighbors

One of the most rewarding aspects of my online life is the community we’ve built together. My Facebook page, I Love Västra Hamnen, has grown to over 19,000 passionate followers. I publish images and films there several times a week in an effort to bottle the essence of this place – the storms, the sunsets, and the quiet morning moments. Knowing that thousands of people share that same “neighborhood pride” and find joy in my visual stories is what keeps me heading out with my camera, even on days like today, when the wind feels like it’s carving ice into my soul.

So, friends, stay warm out there, and keep looking for the beauty in the “now” – no matter the temperature.

This is from an abandoned office not much more than 1 kilometer from where I am writing this in Malmö. It struck me as I saw it flash by in Lightroom that I’ve been semi-subconsciously drawn to unintentional time capsules for several years – abandoned places where time has been preserved not by design, but by neglect, chance, or sudden change.

I keep documenting these time capsules because they carry a particular kind of mystery: rooms left mid-sentence, objects halted in place, quiet traces of human presence without the humans themselves.

They invite curiosity precisely because they refuse to explain themselves, even as they hint at lives interrupted rather than neatly concluded or at least faded out gracefully.

For me, the unintentionally of time capsules do more than fascinate. They hold the tension between what once was and what never got the chance to become – and that gap triggers something both intellectual and visceral: the urge for me to look closer, to record, and to understand what it means to leave without closure.

I don’t think my fixation is accidental. Photography does something similar. It isolates what would otherwise vanish and insists: this mattered. Maybe not forever, but enough to be held onto.

And yes, there’s something personal under this particular surface. As my life has been shaped more by abrupt shifts than gentle transitions – moves, separations, endings that arrived without warning, I rarely got the luxury of easing into change. Instead, I learned to cope afterward, by looking back and reconstructing. Arguably, sometimes lingering a bit too long.

Maybe that’s why I return to the past so often – not out of nostalgia, but because some things were left behind too quickly…

Clomp, clomp, clomp. Wheeze, wheeze, wheeze. Blah, blah, blah.

When I crawled out of bed around five this morning, groggy and stiff as a plank, it was with slow Frankenstein steps that I shuffled over to the Fitness24Seven gym in the block behind our local supermarket, ICA. I was looking forward to the week’s first workout on home turf. The previous session I’d done at the chain’s branch on Hornsgatan in Stockholm.

I like Fitness24Seven’s concept, where your membership gives you free access to all their roughly 280 gyms in five countries. Last year I trained at ten different gyms in Malmö, Gothenburg, Trollhättan, Stockholm, and Bangkok.

The machines aren’t the same quality as at my old gym, where they have Italian Technogym, but they’re perfectly fine. After all, it’s the muscles that are supposed to do the work – not the machines.

Just like so many other Monday mornings around six in the am, only the middle treadmill was available. To my right ran The Clomper, to my left ran The Wheezer, and on the far end walked The Yapper, who, as so often, was in the middle of yet another incredibly important and very loud phone call with someone.

For me, training is non-negotiable. The medication I take for my arthritis suppresses my immune system so much that I have to keep moving just to have a fighting chance against nasty germs and mischievous viruses. On top of that, exercise keeps the ghosts at a respectful distance, which in turn leaves room for my fuel – creativity.

I usually listen to BBC, Monocle Globalist, Conan O’Brien, or The New Yorker Radio Hour when I work out. But The Yapper’s forty-minute phone call this morning made it hard to hear or focus on anything other than the conversation he was having – a call which, judging by the volume, was clearly of the highest national importance.

When The Yapper isn’t running on the treadmill, I can usually hear him talking and laughing so loudly that he truly deserves his nickname. I’m annoyed with myself for not having more civic courage so early in the morning.

I can live with the obviously flat-footed Clomper, and even though it sometimes sounds like The Wheezer is about to give birth any second, it’s really only The Yapper who manages to sabotage my concentration a bit.

From a social-anthropological point of view, I’m fascinated by how some people seem to be completely filterless and can behave as if they own the gym.

Some of the younger guys think it’s perfectly okay to mark three different machines as “theirs” at the same time. Others have no problem scrolling for several minutes between sets, as if they were at a café and not in the middle of a workout.

Last week, I actually mustered the courage to ask a guy (my age) if he’d be done with his sets soon. He just sat there glaring at his screen when I tried to get to the machine he was occupying. He got visibly irritated and snapped:

“I didn’t know you had booked it.”

I laughed, left him to his screen, and went to another machine without thinking too much more about the slightly odd situation. But clearly, I didn’t let it go completely. On the walk home, I felt like a guy from the “gym police”.

Sometimes I have a hard time understanding how people think when they barrel along in their own little bubble without showing the slightest consideration – or even understanding what you’re talking about when I gently point out that it’s not okay. Maybe I’ve just been to Japan too many times.

In an hour or so, it’s supposed to start snowing. If we’re lucky, it’ll remain for a while. I’m looking forward to some snow. I like the light and the silence a blanket of snow brings with it. The fridge and freezer are reasonably well stocked with food, and in one of the kitchen drawers, I’ve collected five or six cans of Heinz Baked Beans in case we end up completely snowed in here in Malmö.

Back in the late 1980s, when the highway between Kiruna and Riksgränsen was closed due to a snowstorm, you’d call the Swedish Road Administration to check when it would open again. A recorded voice on the authority’s phone line would then say:

“This is the Swedish Road Administration’s automated answering service. The road between Kiruna and Riksgränsen is expected to open in three hours. End of message.”

No timestamp, so we had no idea when the recording had been made. But it was also funny. Communication isn’t always that easy. Not for government agencies – and not for people at the gym…