Anders Edström: Safari [signed]

Ways of seeing

From the Bennett Simpson's text:
“In Anders Edstrom’s Safari photographs, for instance, a slow, deliberate looking, a looking focused on a singular subject, a looking that by all appearances holds the outside world at bay, nonetheless reveals an image of openness one might better expect from street or landscape photography, genres bent by time, context, event, and change. But what changes in these Safari pictures? Do they have time or context? What is their world?

On the simple level of subject matter, this is not the world Edstrom typically represents, which despite a signature gauziness—as if the air and light he seeks were particulate, thick, or tactile—is one of people and environments interacting. Even more than his tender domestic tableaux or pedestrian portraits, the Safari images, made over a two-year period in 2002–2004, are inside: the scene, apparently, a studio or a worktable, the range close. So close, in fact, that before one understands that they depict drips or pools of paint on paper, there is an initial sense of abstraction. The soft, existing light pervading the enameled pigments, themselves vibrations of earthy ochres, burnt greens, grays and rusts, suggests a serial display of substance becoming surface—a movement between polish, glaze, and liquid on the one hand and roughness, texture, and mineral on the other. The pleasure, for me, comes in realizing that Edstrom’s formal and material reduction is here no different than elsewhere in his work. Subject matter, whatever it is, only serves sensibility. “



Anders Edström is a Swedish photographer and filmmaker who lives and works in Stockholm. Previous monographs include ”Waiting some birds a bus a woman and spidernets places a crew ”(SteidlMACK, 2004), ”Hanezawa Garden” (Mack, 2015), ”Safari” (Nieves, 2010) and ”Loops” (Antenne, 2019).
Edström's editorial and fashion photography include clients like Vanity Fair, Self Service, The Face, AnOther and brands Jil Sander, Cos, Miu Miu among others. In the 1990s, Edström worked closely with Martin Margiela. And magazine like among others.