J. H. Engström

Paris and Värmland — Photographing Between Two Speeds

Engström was born in Värmland, Sweden, moved to Paris at the age of ten, and returned to Sweden at thirteen, continuing to spend his youth between the two places. Steidl’s biography records that he returned to Paris in 1991 to assist Mario Testino, worked as Anders Petersen’s assistant in Stockholm in 1993, and graduated from the Department of Photography and Film at the University of Gothenburg in 1997^*23. His early movement between city and countryside, and between controlled fashion shoots and documentary situations built on proximity to the subject, helps explain the coexistence of several photographic tempos in his later work.

Engström calls his method “diaristic,” explaining that what he sees every day is true to him and therefore becomes material for photographic narratives^*3. Photography entered his life as a way to retain small events at the distance and emotional pitch at which he encountered them. The possibility of returning to and re-editing old negatives also lets him repeatedly connect the present of taking a photograph with the later present of editing it.

Foam’s Close Surrounding presents his movement between Paris and Värmland as a background for work concerned with solitude and existential uncertainty^*16. Sleek likewise describes From Back Home as a return to the region of his childhood, where home becomes a place whose distance must be measured again with each return^*17.

Learning Proximity from Anders Petersen

His assistantships with Mario Testino in 1991 and Anders Petersen in 1993 placed two very different photographic environments side by side during his formative years^*23. His relationship with Petersen continued and later developed into From Back Home, their joint project on Värmland^*11. These experiences help explain how a photographer familiar with both close, responsive encounters and highly controlled image-making later treated different cameras and distances without a fixed hierarchy.

Engström extends the proximity he learned from Petersen to fragments beyond the human figure. Windows, roads, sky, rooms, plants, and images that can look like failures of light may carry the same weight as a face. In an extended interview with FK, he describes photography as a way of coming into contact with his surroundings and emphasizes the act of photographing as a way of staying close to the intensity of life^*10.

Trying to Dance — Breaking Chronology and Shifting Photographic Distance

Trying to Dance includes self-portraits, lovers and friends, landscapes, still lifes, and snapshots in both color and black and white. The official Trying to Dance page presents numerous photographs as a continuous project and accompanies them with a short statement by Engström on “presence”^*15. What matters is the change in temperature from one image to the next as the pages turn.

In an interview with American Suburb X, Engström distinguishes his work from an autobiography that recounts a life in sequence and instead describes his method as autobiographical^*3. The photographs accumulate as traces of private responses to the surrounding world. This allows blur, grain, overexposure, Polaroids, and large-format photographs to coexist in a single book.

Moving Between Large Format, Snapshots, and Aerial Views in One Book

In a Leica interview, Engström says he places no hierarchy between intuitive and planned photography, choosing color or black and white, sharpness or blur, large-format cameras, disposable cameras, or 8mm according to what he wants to express and why^*1. The differences in image quality within Trying to Dance therefore follow changes in his distance from the subject and the energy of the moment. A slow large-format portrait placed beside a rapid handheld image changes the viewer’s bodily tempo within the book.

Aperture’s workshop description similarly presents his work as grounded in proximity to lived experience and an intuitive use of photography^*6. The visual inconsistency is deliberate. Avoiding a single recognizable look preserves the changing distance between photographer and subject from one encounter to the next.

Making the Photobook the Final Form — Meaning Between Pages

Engström has described the photobook as the “ultimate photographic expression,” extending photographic meaning to the quality of printing and the tactile character of paper^*1. He also recalls that when he published his first book in the mid-1990s, the current photobook boom did not yet exist, and that the photobook later gained rapid visibility as an art form^*1. Rhythm between pages, the relation of preceding and following images, and the time of physically turning pages provide the conditions that bring his heterogeneous photographs into a single work.

LFI notes that Engström had oriented his work toward publication since the 1990s, before the photobook boom, and connects separate photographs through an editing process it describes as “visual poetry”^*13. Adjacent photographs produce associations, leaving the reader to construct what lies between them. That interval makes the book itself the form of the work.

From Back Home — What Changes When Two Photographers Picture Home

From Back Home is a collaboration in which Engström and Anders Petersen photographed Värmland over roughly seven years beginning in 2001. The National Science and Media Museum describes their return to a region formative for both photographers as a journey of rediscovery through people and place^*8. With two photographers working in the same region, “home” becomes a place where several distances and memories overlap.

LensCulture notes how the two photographers’ distinct visual languages sit side by side in the book while remaining connected through their attention to people and place^*9. The collaboration turns autobiographical photography away from a single first-person account and layers two different relationships to the same place within one volume.

Sketch of Paris — Editing Paris as Twenty Years of Lived Time

Sketch of Paris re-edits photographs made between 1991 and 2012, layering streets, nudes, friends, interiors, and traces of relationships into one book. Engström explains that he did not conceive a story moving from A to B, but began from the way memories mix. He also connects his time in Paris, where he discovered that art could be a profession, to the beginning of his own work^*24. In the same interview, he says that the freedom he found in exhibition formats suited the photobook as a medium. The book is structured so that twenty years of personal time can appear at once.

Akio Nagasawa Gallery likewise places his work between Paris and Sweden and identifies his many photobooks as central to his production^*7. Across changing locations, he continues to bring fragments made over long periods back into contact in books, presenting the city as an accumulation of lived time.

Tout Va Bien — Keeping the Tension Between Title and Image

Tout Va Bien brings together portraits, landscapes, childbirth, bodies, animals, and dark interiors, with wide differences in both subject and technique. The Leica Oskar Barnack Award described the series through the coexistence of autobiographical elements, bodies, landscapes, birth, and animals^*12. The distance between the title—“everything will be fine”—and the anxiety or rawness of the images leaves a persistent tension across the book.

The Leica Camera Blog describes a working process in which numerous dummies were produced and repeatedly edited before the book was completed^*14. The apparently spontaneous book is therefore the result of a long process of sequencing. The official project page also presents the series while preserving the differences among its individual images^*5.

Revoir — Re-reading Old Negatives from the Present

In Revoir, Engström returned to negatives from the period around Trying to Dance, including previously unpublished photographs, and rescanned and re-edited them. The publisher’s description emphasizes the making of new prints and sequences through his present-day judgment^*18. Old negatives change in meaning over time and become material to be read again through present editing.

In 2025, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson presented DIMMA / BRUME / MIST as a photobook tracing thirty-five years of work and invited Engström to discuss image selection, layout, and sequencing within its photobook program^*2.

Camus and “Doubt” — Linking Private Photographs to Existential Questions

Engström has said that Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus strongly affected him when he was young, and he repeatedly returns to the sense that the world cannot be fully understood, to images that seem both inside and outside the self, and to “doubt” as a force that drives his work^*25. Family, nudity, tables, forests, wounds, and children function as fragments through which life, death, time, and belonging remain unresolved. In the same interview, Engström says that “fragility” matters more to him than roughness and values the uncertainty produced by shifts in energy, a distinction that clarifies his approach to photographs^*25.

Foam reads his work through questions of human solitude and absurdity, emphasizing the room the photographs leave for the viewer’s own experience^*16. Even without knowing the specific event behind a photograph, a reader can register emotional movement through distance between pages, physical proximity, and sudden gaps.

After Trying to Dance — Editing Recognized Through Photobook Culture

Trying to Dance was shortlisted for the 2005 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, From Back Home received the photobook award at Arles, and Tout Va Bien won the Leica Oskar Barnack Award. This record shows how strongly Engström’s reception has centered on editing and publishing as well as on individual photographs^*4. As photobook culture expanded after the 2000s, he continued to use the book as a primary form capable of holding differences in photographic method, jumps in time, and intervals of meaning.

If attention stays only on the mixture of color and black and white, different cameras, private snapshots, and abstract images, Engström’s work can be reduced to a style of “rough” photobook-making. As he explains in American Suburb X, photography is a language for preserving personal responses to a changing environment, and keeping those responses in different photographic forms is part of the method^*3. The photobook becomes a place where fragments continue to alter one another without resolving a life into a single conclusion.

The Photobook as an Ongoing Site of Production

The 2005 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize shortlisted Trying to Dance, recognizing the mixture of portraits of friends, interiors, landscapes, color, and rough black-and-white images as part of the book’s momentum^*19.

The Image Museum photobook library describes Trying to Dance as a volume in which landscapes, still lifes, self-portraits, and snapshots intersect diaristically. Its reception has repeatedly focused on the way different kinds of images create the book’s temporal experience^*20.

For the 2025 publication Dimma Brume Mist, Engström returned to thirty-five years of contact sheets and negatives held in more than two hundred binders, reworking pairs such as city/country, stillness/movement, and self/other into new sequences^*21.

Photo Poche similarly characterizes his long-term work through countryside and city as metaphors for tensions between introspection and impulse, security and vulnerability, self and other^*22.