From Svartån to Gammelgården
Svartån – Gammelgården
There are days you don’t plan.
You bring the camera just in case, head out, and let the day decide what it wants to be.
This turned out to be one of them.
Leica Camera News
Mari Amman is an American-Italian contemporary artist working across disciplines with photography, installation, video, poetry, painting, sculpture, textiles and design.
She describes her own work as research-based, using concepts such as Geological Empathy and Sublime Rheology to explore the relationship between people, nature, technology and built environments.
Young, Inspiring and International: LOBA Emerging Talent
The German photographer Serghei Duve won the 2025 Newcomer Award with the photo series “Bright Memory”.
In the project he explores his family’s connection to Transnistria.
📷 LEICA M11 Monochrom · Summilux-M 1:1.4/50 ASPH. · f/9.5 · 1/250s · ISO 125 · 50mm · 2026-08-23
From Svartån to Gammelgården
The morning by the river
I started downtown, along the Svartån river.
There’s an old wrought-iron railing there that I have walked past a hundred times without seeing.
This morning I saw it.
Two big spirals that meet in the middle and form a keyhole, almost a leaf.
So I stood in close, let the iron fall out of focus, and waited.
After a while she came.
Denim jacket, hair up, keys hanging at her hip, mid-stride.
She walked straight through the opening without having the faintest idea.
Then she was gone.
After that I walked around to the other side, mostly out of curiosity.
And there the thing I hadn’t counted on happened: the light.
From that direction the sun ran along every curved bar, and the iron was no longer a black mass but a wing.
The same railing.
Just a different side.
A woman with earphones passed behind it, jacket over her arm, phone in her hand.
The petunias glowed white behind her.
I pressed the shutter, and that picture turned out better than the first one.
That is worth remembering.
Sometimes you don’t need a new subject.
Sometimes you just need to walk ten metres to one side.
From Svartån to Gammelgården
Home, food and feet up
Then I headed home.
Something in the stomach, a while in the chair, and that half hour when you do nothing at all.
It sounds trivial to write about.
But anyone who has been out with a camera all morning knows that the rest is half of what makes the evening possible.
And the evening was booked.
From Svartån to Gammelgården
Gammelgården in Köping
That is where I met Bildgruppen Prisma.
We sat down at the tables under the trees.
The tripods lay folded in front of us like tools after a shift, and the light fell in patches through the leaves.
Someone laughed at something that had already turned into a story, and she laughed so that the whole table smiled along.
A little way off sat one of us with his cap pulled down and his phone in his hands.
The camera lay set aside beside him on the bench.
There is a kind of stillness in a photographer who has just stopped photographing, and it stuck.
Two others had placed themselves in the shade under a tree, looking out across the field.
Hat, backpack, a camera hanging from one hand.
The backlight turned them into two dark figures against all that brightness, and they said nothing for a long while.
They just stood there reading the light, the way you do when you have been at it a while.
Then we spread out, the way we usually do.
I found a spider’s web hanging in backlight, with a narrow streak of light behind it.
Without that streak the threads would not have existed at all.
That is how thin it is sometimes — the difference between a picture and nothing.
A little further on stood an old garden pump.
I went in close and photographed only one detail: a collar of cast iron, lichen in the cracks, paint that has been flaking for decades.
You cannot see that it is a pump.
You see that someone once cast it, and that it has stood outdoors ever since.
And finally I ended up at the throwing cage, where a young thrower was winding up in the circle behind the safety net.
I photographed straight through the mesh.
The apartment blocks stood like a backdrop behind her, and she was mid-turn with her arm extended.
📷 LEICA M11 Monochrom · Summilux-M 1:1.4/50 ASPH. · f/2.8 · 1/2000s · ISO 125 · 50mm · 2026-08-24
Strömsholm, another day
Strömsholm, another day
Strömsholm is a place I keep returning to, and before I have even stepped out of the car I roughly know what to look for.
First the old canteen.
The pretzel hangs above the door and the old sign still promises bar service, chocolate and cigarettes.
The bicycles lean outside the way they always do, and people sit on the porch having their coffee.
None of it has changed in years, and that is the whole point.
After that, up towards the palace.
The clouds hung heavy that day, just heavy enough, and the gravel path leads the eye straight ahead between the clipped yews.
A couple walked ahead of me, and she pointed at something up by the roof.
Behind the palace the park opens up.
Two identical tables stood on the grass — one empty in the shade under the trees, one taken out in the light.
I did not see it when I took the picture.
I saw it afterwards, at home in front of the screen, and that is often when pictures tell you what they are about.
Then I found the sunflower.
A double variety, shaggy as a pompom, with two bumblebees working up in the head.
In black and white a flower like that becomes pure form.
No colour to distract, just hundreds of narrow petals laying themselves layer upon layer.
And then the horses, of course.
First two of them far off, grazing behind a fence by the pond, with the reeds in the foreground and the oaks like a curtain behind.
But the picture I drove home with was a different one: a horse that came up to the fence, put its ears forward and looked straight into the camera.
The neck in side light, the muscles like sculpture.
Sometimes the subject comes to you.
And then the circus
And then the circus
One evening Cirkus Brazil Jack stood on a gravel lot on the edge of town.
The tent was the obvious subject — the stripes, the flags, the guy wires against the sky.
But it was the caravans behind it that caught me.
A whole row, parked tight, a car wedged between two of them, and someone glimpsed in the gap.
That is where the circus lives.
The ring is the work; the caravans are the home.
I stayed longer than I had meant to.
That is because I am writing a book in which a man wakes up in a caravan on a gravel lot like this one, and in which the horses mean more to him than the audience ever does.
The prologue and first chapter can be read here: Three Steps Behind (PDF)
Pictures from the day
