Martina Hoogland Ivanow: Shadow Works, Living the Dream 1994–2024 [signed]

A mid-career retrospective on the renowned Swedish photographer Martina Hoogland Ivanow, known for her moody, atmospheric style that explores intimacy, isolation, and the unseen.  The book includes 8 series and and a selection of her editorial work for Dazed & Confused, 10 Magazine, The Face and Another.

From the publisher:
Martina Hoogland Ivanow is an artist working primarily with photography and film, exploring the interplay between filtered light, sound and image. After an acclaimed early career as an international photographer in New York, Paris and London, she established her art practice in Stockholm in 2002, where she continues to live and work.

Shadow Works, Living the Dream, published by Livraison Books in 2025, presents a newly edited selection spanning thirty years of photography. The book includes images from her series Speedway (2002 - 2005), Far Too Close (2002 – 2007), Elephant and Castle (2009), Satellite (2009 – 2010), Circular Wait (2010 - 2014), Early Reading (2016 – 2018), Re-enactment (2016 - 2019) and Second Nature (2019 – 2024). It also features fashion editorial work from 1994 to the early 2000s, originally published in Dazed & Confused, 10 Magazine, The Face and Another.

In recent work, Hoogland Ivanow has deconstructed documentary imagery, revisiting her extensive archive of negatives. This process led her to rediscover and rework past photographs, ultimately inspiring the creation of this book:

I’ve been thinking about what comes before and after, about repetition and the potential of abstraction. Certain themes emerge — irrationality, theatricality, and the ways we play with identity. It’s multi–layered and interspersed.

I see humans as the rare species, the odd ones. We know what to do but are incapable of doing it. We are the parasites of the earth. We are also extraordinary.

In my relationship with the camera, I have developed methods involving visual displacements and the manipulation of shadows to create a visual language characterised by reduction and abstraction. In this respect, analogue photography and the darkroom have been useful, as the opacity or transparency of the negative, when exaggerated, creates the possibility of absence. I find that a camera often captures more information than the human eye can register, and therefore explores the possibility of showing less.

- Martina Hoogland Ivanow

In today’s image-saturated world, we often take photography for granted, overlooking the poetic essence that the medium holds. The publication features 183 images printed on uncoated paper, with book design by Sandberg&Timonen and an extensive text by curator Grace Johnston, based on conversations with the artist between April and June 2024.