Lunar Cycles
Lotta Törnroth
”The new moon was rising in the south-east. A little crescent moon – the new beginning of a darker, autumn month.”
From Moominpappa at Sea, Tove Jansson
The book Lunar Cycles departs from family and family relations. It’s a story about twosomeness, loneliness, illness and grief. I have been photographing my parents since my father fell ill in 2005. On their own but also together with me. My father passed in 2017, during his last twelve years he allowed me to photograph him without really questioning my intentions. With time it was more like we made the photographs together. After the death of my father I continued photographing my mother.
When my father was dying I was at an island farthest out in the archipelageo of Åland. My mother called me and asked me to come home in time to say goodbye. The night before going home was among the worst in my life, and to keep the thoughts at bay i photographed the full moon which was spectacular in the starry October night sky. I have revisited that moon every following year as a comfort.
Afterword: Linda Bergman, writer and photographer/artist.
Graphic design: Johanna Sevholt & Lotta Törnroth.
Publisher: Blackbook Publications.
Lotta Törnroth (b. 1981 in Solna) works with photography, text, sculpture and aquarelle. She is educated at the University of Photography in Gothenburg and at Aalto University, the University of Art, Design and Architecture in Helsinki. Törnroth has published two monographs with the publisher Blackbook Publications, and participated in exhibitions in Sweden and abroad. In 2023, she spent 6 months at IASPIS in Stockholm, where she worked on, among other things, the photo book Lunar Cycles.
FEVER
Rikard Laving
Rikard Laving, born in 1978, works across genres with everything from documentary projects to artistic exploration of materials and techniques. Regularly publishes photographic books/publications and is a trained teacher at Konstfack. Represented since 2016 by French gallery VU’.
Splinter
Ela Polkowska
“Splinter” is a story of people living in continuous disorder and about the feeling of uneasiness that their lives provoke.
In the course of a year, I visited a family living in a house which should have fallen apart a long time ago. Yet, its residents apparently refused to accept that only order is legitimate in today’s world. They created around themselves a world resembling a warehouse – a space packed with things, whether working or not. Every time I went there, things would change their position, it seemed that the continuous change gave meaning to that reality.
At the same time, I had the feeling that something is wrong, that this perpetual motion and disorder should have end up with a catastrophe. And, somehow, this happened – the car which was owned by the family crushed, two animals died and the woman left the man and the house.
Ela Polkowska. Photographer based in Gothenburg, Sweden, interested in documenting people, places and objects on the margins of everyday life and subjects relegated from the dominant public memory or hidden from consciousness. She studied Art History and Film Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. Graduated from the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava and HDK-Valand Academy in Gothenburg, Sweden. Exhibited in Athens, New York, Budapest, Lisbon, Riga, Kiev and Krakow, among others. One of the artists chosen for PARALLEL Photo Platform and Futures Platform (nominated by Photofestival in Łódź).
Paler Ash
Emanuel Cederqvist & Sean Gardiner
Paler Ash traces the changing fate of the ash tree following the onset of ash dieback, a fungal disease originating from Asia which is currently spreading throughout Europe, posing a serious threat to the species future.
The European ash is a deciduous tree native across much of the continent. It is common, culturally rich and ecologically important. While it is unknown how much dieback will affect the population as a whole – estimates vary from tentatively hopeful to devastatingly total – its impact will undoubtedly be catastrophic for both the species and the spaces it inhabits.
The photographs centre around Öland, Sweden (where the disease is well established and obvious) and Dorset, England (where it was then only starting to make itself apparent). These locations – a relative east and west of the geographic range of the tree – function as vague mirrors, each reflecting a different tense which ultimately comes to haunt the other, whether as approximate past or impending future. Combined, they become a means of visualising the way that meaning slips from place, as well as considering the shape that its disappearance might take.
Although the origins of dieback remain ambiguous at present – its spread the result of a combination of things, some arguably natural, others probably avoidable, rather than a single, easily blameable cause – it is difficult not to see its onset as characteristic of the time we are living through. The work is intended as both document and elegy, simultaneously paying testament to the presence of the tree while hinting at the tangible absence of its loss.
Emanuel Cederqvist (1983, SE) is a photographer based in Gothenburg, Sweden. His work has been included in solo and group exhibitions throughout Europe, including at Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg and Capa Center, Budapest. He has a master in Photography from the University of Gothenburg. His work is based on an interest in how we interpret and read the forms of the landscape in the light of our own memories, experiences and through our common cultural heritage.
Sean Gardiner (1986, Great Britain) is an artist based in Dorset, England. He studied at the University of Brighton and the University of Gothenburg. His practice charts an ongoing engagement with place, typically merging natural and cultural history with an investigation into the physical properties of the photographic medium.