Hello and welcome to my website. These images are exposed in the years 1980-2024 and are all taken with large-format cameras in the formats 9×12 cm, 4×5″, 13×18 cm, 16×21 cm and 8×10″; different lenses with suitable focal lengths for the different formats, such as Ektar, Dagor, Heliar, Kodak and various brass lenses. Please ask if interested.
And it’s exclusively portraits in portrait format because people are mostly tall and thin. Portraits are of particular interest to me as they become richer with time, therefore all images are dated. New images will be added as time permits. Tip: Reduce the screen size so you don’t have to scroll.
It started with Roman Polanski’s b/w film Cul de Sac, a psychological drama thriller, with, among others, Lionel Stander. I want to remember a fantastic photo with rather harsh light. I got myself a camera in the year 1966 or 1967, the film was shown for the first time in Sweden.
Most of the time there was no film in the camera but I looked at the world through the viewfinder and was fascinated by the crop, being able to isolate an image from its surroundings.
My years as an amateur photographer were not very successful. I was in a photo club where you looked at each other’s pictures and commented on all the mistakes. Won first prize in a nationwide competition with a picture of a girl friend with a generous chest size. The jury thought it was fine.
I set up a darkroom in the basement, a space with leaky wooden walls where I taped off any light leaks. Built a bench from an old coffee table and had a lamp with a red plastic bag over it. In the space next to it was running water and I put the copies in a bucket and rinsed them under a faucet of ice cold water.
Was able to get up at 04.00 am and take walks in Vallentuna and snapped pictures of everything possible. What I discovered in the aimlessness was that when I analyzed the negatives, there were certain images that had something in common, shape! I developed my composition and understood that it is important in all forms of image creation that there is balance.
After various studies I entered Bonniers Bookhouse as a publishing student, this was in 1978. A few years later I studied at the Graphic Institute and in 1980 I also entered the Art School in Stockholm. By then I had already got a job at Bonniers and my teacher, Jan Fridlund, wanted me to both work and study. It took a while, but in the end I chose the job as image and publishing editor. I later became editor-in-chief and production manager for the book The Swedish Photography History, Rittsel/Söderberg.
In the same period, I got in touch with photographer Gunnar Smoliansky and was very inspired by him. At the time I lived on Sveavägen in Stockholm and there was a bus stop with bus 2 that went to Gunnar’s address on Bondegatan. He was very interested in historical techniques and later when I started freelancing as a photographer, that was my main interest. We used large format cameras with large negatives that could be contact copied onto various photographic emulsions. Unfortunately, I was quite uninterested in commercial assignments and my wife didn’t like it. We were quite poor but we lived in our own nice house in Vallentuna and spent the summers in the south of France where my wife’s parents had a fantastic house.
Gunnar Smoliansky was a minimalist and has an interesting visual language in the frugal sphere in which he moved. On the other hand, I soon became interested in portraiture. I have spent many hours wandering the European portrait galleries and studying the great masters. And that’s what I would recommend to all young photographers, to learn from the great masters because they are usually educated. And never forget that success is mostly hard bought. To take two steps forward, you usually have to take one step back. And you mostly doubt yourself.
My father was a writer and he described the unglamorous drudgery of writing a novel. He could say:
-Writing a novel is like digging a ditch.What he probably meant is that you can’t go and wait for inspiration, but it’s better to have rock-solid routines.
Tomas Segebladh, Stockholm, April 2024