Interview by Claudia Bigongiari
All Images © Björn Nilsson
Björn Nilsson is a photographer based in Stockholm. After working for a local newspaper in the 90’s, he dedicated his studies to media and communication, defining his role as a cultural scientist.
Around 2015 he started working full time again on personal visual projects, and his series Samtal Misslyckades is now about to be published to be published as a book. His work has already been awarded with prizes such as Prix de la Photographie de Paris in 2021, Tokyo PhotoAwards and Documentary Family award in 2020 and Lenzburg Foto Festival.
The stories portrayed by Björn Nilsson instantly allow the viewer to access a very private and intimate atmosphere. Every single image he creates is, in fact, a story full of emotions, arising both from real daily events and his mind’s imagination.
With the project Samtal Misslyckades (Failed Conversation) started in 2022, Nilsson explores the intimacy of human relationships and the inner ruptures generated by power structures, role struggles, silences. He narrates the story of his couple’s life and dynamics where balances have started to collapse, staging his visions in front of the camera or just drawing them into a travel book. Before becoming photographs, Nilsson’s images exist inside his mind and most of the time the work overlaps his life, emotions and thoughts.
The suspended and imaginary dimension he achieved with photography comes from a research that, at a first sight, seems more anchored to a documentative analysis: he tells personal narratives together with the social reality he observes. The result is a universal story of losing communication everybody can relate to.
He selects provocative and direct images that, even with the discomfort they generate, communicate a language of connection, inspired from the most understandable feelings of humanity, the ones of relationships.
In this extreme truth, rupture of ideal life’s equilibrium, as well as of the ideal image’s construction, are grounded in the motivations to select the Swedish artist. Björn Nilsson does not follow any photographic genre, preferring all the possible extensions that his imagination produces in the name of storytelling. They walk the thin line between documentary and fiction, between personal behaviour and an entire cultural identity.
Claudia Bigongiari (CB): Hello Björn, welcome to this section dedicated to the shortlisted authors from the Open Call. First of all, congratulations for being selected with your project and thank you for participating!
Share with us a bit about yourself, and delve into the long-term journey of your connection with photography. Despite encountering intermittent pauses along the way, your passion for photography has endured.
Björn Nilsson (BN): I started taking pictures when my teacher in high school put a camera in my hands, urging me to take photographs. I wanted to paint but I was too self aware and I couldn’t paint in public. So I began taking pictures and developing films, soon I realised that I enjoyed making images with the camera more than painting.
It took me some years until I could buy myself my own camera. Since my budget was limited and I couldn’t shoot as much as I wanted, I started different night courses in photography, thanks to which I had the big chance to access the Swedish Television’s dark room. Then life occurred: university, parties, relationships, I started working for the local newspapers, more and more life took over and then I became a father. I began a new curse of study in cultural science with a main focus on media and communication. If I couldn’t take pictures I could at least write about them. The years went by, more kids came, I separated, but the urge to take and make images never really disappeared.
So eight years ago I started all over again. Learning everything from the ground up, even things I knew from the past. I tried all the genres, and started to find out who I was as a photographer. It quickly became apparent that I wasn’t a commercial photographer. So I embarked on a journey to discover if I had any stories to tell. After a couple of years, I realised I had plenty of them.
When I start a project or draw the outline I usually dig where I stand. I analyse what’s around or inside me. Is there anything interesting for me? And can it interest others? How do I make it interesting for both? As all photographers do, I lose from time to time my inspiration, my passion, but over the years I have built up a small library with photo books and art books I always return to when my passion fails me. I always find my way then, after reading a couple of books.
(CB): In an interview you had with FRAME magazine you say that at some point in your life you reach a level where you don’t care too much about the career process but just about how you feel to photograph. How would you define your practice? What do you look for in the images you create?
(BN): A couple of years ago I realised that I wont get grants since I am a fifty-year-old white, bald man. There are other newer artists who have and should have this opportunity. I haven’t had a career in photography so the industry doesn’t know me. I focused on my own practice, my own projects. Of course I try to reach people with different projects through open calls, exhibitions, and so forth but I’m at peace with the fact that I love what I do. I work both in documentary and art photography with no clear boundaries between them. I see pictures either in real life or in my head. In this latter case I draw it in the travel books that I always have with me. Afterwards I try to reenact what I imagined. That’s the procedure I also used in Samtal Misslyckades.
(CB): Talking about the project you presented to our Open Call, Failed conversation, a narration about relationship, intimacy and the inner structures of two people living together, at what point do these structures start to collapse and it becomes difficult to communicate? Why and when did you start the series?
(BN): I live in a very equal relationship. We discuss most things, like relationship issues and personal ones, about life in general or just everyday talks. But in all relationships there is a power struggle. Even if you don’t want one or work against it.
Who should have the interpretative priority in different issues? At the beginning of relationships these things are fairly simple. When you grow older, life changes, you change, the relationship’s dynamics change as well. If you don’t keep discussing, trying to understand the other person’s journey, it will quickly become a gap between individuals. If you don’t close this gap, it will nurture more and more suspicion.
When I realised how far my own relationship had gone, I started thinking about what had happened, and that’s how the project started. Even if I perceive myself as equal, when my wife, for instance, started making more money, I started feeling inadequate, both in life and bed. What did she need me for? When I started getting more and more into photography, she also felt left out, like I had another more important world to live in. We were close to a disaster.
When I started making pictures about the relationship I asked her if she wanted to participate or if I should bring in another woman to play her role. She agreed to play herself, so I thought it might bring us together, but unfortunately the opposite occurred: I was struggling making images and most of the drawings I made didn’t turn into photographs.
(CB): The project is based on a social scale. You collect similarities among other couples’ relationships but in the end you chose to portray just you and your wife. Did you stage other stories or did you prefer to delve deeper into your own intimacy?
(BN): I worked with another couple that intended to be in the project. When I made the final selection, I had some help from the Swedish photographer Anna Claren who suggested that the project would benefit and be stronger if I focused only on my relationship. But all the questions raised during the practice weren’t only from my own life.
(CB): Several images in the series depict broken elements, such as shattered eggs on the floor, a torn shirt, and a disrupted sidewalk. Are these instances purely incidental, or do they connect with a deeper sense of uneasiness and a rupture in communication within the narrative of your work?
(BN): I wanted the book to feel uneasy, as if something horrible was lurking under the surface. The broken things are meant to connotate that. I wanted to convey the idea of rupture, but not of violence (physical or mental). I put images, two by two in the book, to magnify a particular emotion, to lift it or change it. Even broken and worn things, together with portraits, can empathise more than the image itself, and hopefully start an interaction with the viewer.
I wanted the book to be a bit “raw” and “brutal” (not in relation to violence, as I said, but to a directness of images), and I decided to also insert the images from my drawing-board, which I couldn’t make with the camera due to difficulties with my wife.
As soon as Clara Diesen, the poet who contributed with a suite of poems to the publication, sent me her text, she made everything feel in the right place. She was able to transform my images into something else, she brought stillness into the uneasiness.
(CB): Within the mixing of various image types, your collection encompasses both familiar spaces capturing daily scenarios and more ethereal visions — like the portrayal of you and your wife seemingly suspended, merging into a singular form, or the intentionally blurred compositions. How do you perceive the interplay between those grounded in reality and those that explore suspended realms?
(BN): I have never limited myself to one style. My photographs are mostly recognisable, regardless of style. it’s a fine line: trying to stay into the documentary field but yet telling a story about things that don’t manifest in the real world. Life is full of both: it doesn’t matter if it’s more visible in the picture where me and my wife are floating, or when I pose wearing 3D goggles, or even when my wife is having a bath with my son. They are three different expressions but the images are grounded in social realism, that’s why I used them all, with the aim of telling something personal but not too far from the documentary.
(CB); The Open Call was looking for projects not necessarily completed. Your series has become a photo book this year, which other extensions do you imagine for it?
(BN): I had a book release and an exhibition at Candyland in Stockholm this year. The book lives its own life now, the story belongs to others and they interpret it as they please. Like it should be. Regarding the project itself, I’m experimenting right now with a possible extension related to anxiety. During the whole process of Samtal Misslyckades I struggled with anxiety, up to a point where I thought of giving up. Now that I feel better, I would like to dig deeper into that field.
Another extension of the series could be working with the couple I ended up not involving in the project and experiment alternative ways of living within the normal frame.
(CB): Pellicola Magazine and Mucho Mas! selected your work to spark an encounter and a discussion on transformation, not only of the image but also related to its extension into space. What are your expectations related to this encounter?
(BN): Many men have related to the book. In Stockholm my intention was to reach different organisations that gather men within dedicated forums. I wanted the discussion to focus on how to overcome struggles, differences, also what occurs in oneself during different stages of couple life and how to get through them.
