Since “Something old” was for Limbo pictures, this photograph is perhaps a little out of place on this page. Taken in the summer of 1981, it has lived on in my Elisabeth and Christine series. However I am working on a book, “Summer 1981” and I pulled the print out of its box and scanned it. It was taken in July at our summer cabin and, even if I don’t give my pictures titles, is archived under the code name “Gulliver”. Elisabeth, who was then going on 6 years old, is now going on 35. We still have the boat, “Erik” and maybe Elisabeth’s son, Isak will play with it this summer.

In the fall of 1965 I received a scholarship to study Radio and Television Production at The American University in Washington D.C. One of my duties connected with the scholarship was to take pictures for the University. I may even have been The Photographer, but I’m not sure. One of my first jobs was to do a little feature for the magazine on the activities of the school theatre group. For some reason, I decided to use the school’s 6X6 camera, a format I hadn’t used for two years. Of course I had in that time managed to forget all about lining up the arrows on the film with the arrows on the camera and this was the result. Luckily there was no deadline on this project and I could go back and get the pictures I needed. I printed this picture just to see what it looked like and the editor liked it so much he used it on the table of contents page! It is also distinguished in that it is one of two negatives I have managed to lose in my “career” as a photographer. I keep hoping that it’s just misplaced in those tons of negatives I have in my basement.

On November 18, 2008, my grandmother would have been 128 years old. I decided it would be nice to send a picture of her to all her descendents, my relatives. I knew almost exactly when I took it, November 1963, and a 5-minute trip to my darkroom brought it to the light of day. It was on a roll with 11 horrible exposures but I was lucky, this was negative number 12, perfectly exposed and in perfect shape after 45 years. As I was scanning it in to send it off I mused if anyone could find a digital picture that easily and if all the 1s and 0s would fall into place in the year 2053.

I took this photograph of my foot and some cobblestones one sunny day in Uppsala, 1977. I liked the picture (still do) and thought I'd do a series of similar pictures with the code name "Mimosa Kiel" after the name of the photopaper I printed it on. The project never really went anywhere and my paper got older and older. I learned a lot about projects, the need for a goal, a statement and that a loose concept never usually leads anywhere. The following year I started another project, that, one thing leading to another, has kept me busy up to the present day. So "Mimosa Kiel" wasn't entirely wasted. Sure was a lovely photopaper though!

I have two daughters, Elisabeth and Christine. Aside from the "project pictures" (Elisabeth and Christine), and all the family snapshots, I have had another project "monthly pictures". Every month, since June of 1980 when Christine was 6 months old, I have taken a picture of Elisabeth and a picture of Christine, on Polaroid SX70. Then I wrote on the back of the picture a little summary of what we did that day. Elisabeth would get the picture I took of Christine and vice versa.
We often have great fun taking out the pictures and looking at them and reading the text: "OK, pick a date!" This time it's the first of August 1981. I wrote on the back: "We went out walking to get some pine and spruce trees to fill out in front of the cabin. On the way back, Christine stopped and said "Mamma, mygg illa ögon" (Mommy bug hurt eye). And it swelled and turned bluish-pink. Later she lay on the sofa."

After I finished my first photo courses I suffered from "lack of darkroom" disease. So I joined the University of Miami's press corps. My first photo assignment was to photograph this lovely young lady. On the back of the contact I've noted that her name was Barbara Biggart and it was taken for the school magazine "Tempo". My next assignment was to photograph the Beatles as they came through Miami to or from the Bahamas where they filmed "HELP". No wonder I thought I wanted to be a photojournalist!

Towards the end of my first term of photo studies (the fall of 1963), I was asked by a fraternity to take some pictures of a float they were building for some parade (I don't remember which parade). A real novice, enthusiatic and insecure with my photographic responsibility, I took three rolls of 120 film, a huge amount for me then. I took lots of people posing and working, but I also took "artistic" shots.

I thought my artistic shots were good but the fraternity had no use for them, nor did the pictures fit into an assignment, so they never got printed. When looking for them I found I didn't even have a contact, so I had a merry time holding my negative sheets up to the light one by one, the whole fall of 1963 passing before my eyes. I found them, December 10th, and scanned in this picture. I'll probably never get around to printing them (I have lots of other negatives waiting in line), but at least I have it here!