AT HOME IN SWEDEN, GERMANY AND AMERICA

Gerry Johansson’s book “At home in Sweden, Germany and America” collects 20 unpublished photographs taken by the Sverige, Deutschland and Amerika trilogy. This publishing contains an original text by Stefania Rössl, and was made with the contribution of Spazio Labo’, Officine Fotografiche Roma, Otium and Circolo fotografico El Paveion.

The seasons have changed / And the light / And the weather / And the hour. / But it is the same land. / And I begin to know the map / And to get my bearings.

The last lines of a poem from Dag Hammarskjöld’s diary, quoted in Robert Adams’ Beauty in Photography, seem to find an echo in Gerry Johansson’s photographs, which embody the conditions and hopes that exist so that all of us can rediscover and re-appreciate the places we inhabit. All the physical, geographical and biographical characteristics of a landscape, just like the one described above in a literary form, show they are still open to new interpretations, through the medium of photography, and through the sublime essentialness that unites these pictures, seem to take on a new form of language. The twenty photographs presented in this book were taken during photographic explorations in Sweden, Germany and the United States, the fruit of almost thirty years of work by the artist, and bring together a selection of unpublished pictures that are not in his well-known trilogy Sverige, Deutschland and Amerika. The sequence is in strict alphabetic order, following the names of the places Johansson came to on his way across each of the countries, and at the same time introduces a chronological reading that recalls key phases of his life. This too seems to evoke Robert Adams, especially when he says, with regard to Hammarskjöld, “only when you have loved your own landscape will you be able to love others as well.” As a result, the Swedish landscapes he was born and grew up in, the memories of a dream-like Germany restored by his father, and the experience of adolescence in America all burst forth, coming back to breathe life into the present and render it fruitful through memory, “so that the past was made to encroach upon the present,” as Proust said, “and I was made to doubt whether I was in the one or the other.”

Edited by Stefania Rössl, Massimo Sordi
Graphic design Damiano Fraccaro / Otium
Printing Grafiche Antiga
Publisher Tira books, Sweden 2020

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