RUM Magazine #199 September 2018, passes the door-step of a grand apartment at Norr Mälarstrand in Stockholm. When it is an empty shell and architect Andreas Martin-Löf´s restoration project a blank paper.
Nature or culture. The solid rock foundation of Stockholm City in RUM Magazine #197, July 2018.
”Architecture brut”. A survey of an architectural phenomenon in comparison with a famous sparkling wine. Text and photo by Johan Fowelin in ”RUM” #182, April 2017.
My credo to the authenticity of rural life and architecture in Blekinge. Text and photos in “Form” 5/2015.
Fashion Tale Magazine; I intended to predict the future. A future, we may fear, is not sunny. It´s probably wet, cloudy and very near. Sometimes excessively hot too. So was model; Natalia Khutkubia from Tiblisi, Georgia. In that future, will there be any Caucasians, fashion stylists with dogs or water to drink? Styling Martin Bergstrom.
# 1 / C5
I have no secrets.
(Aki Kaurismäki in Livraison #3)
Clothes by Sandra Backlund.
Signed “W.Germany”, “Import” or “#13” this pottery is mass-produced. Occasionally Danish hand-crafted or Swedish amateur works. In rare cases pieces by known artists. This is a homage to Cezanne, Morandi and Robert Mapplethorpe. As well as generations of art students struggling with shadows, shapes and forms of a “Nature Morte” consisting of randomly collected items, put together by a teacher in messy hair and corduroy, suggesting he is true believer of ART. Book project, text by Lars O. Ericsson.
Tempus edax rerum, tuque, invidiosa vetustas, omnia destruitis vitiataque dentibus aevi paulatim lenta consumitis omnia morte!
(Oividius Metamorphoses XV, 234.)
Weird title in Bon Magazine #11, Februari 2003. Styling by Pepe Biroun Vand.
Printed negatives from a public archive at the Local Transport Company in Stockholm (SL). Exhibited at Roger Björkholmen and Index Gallery, Stockholm.
Climate change is here to stay.
Flat scans of handmade fibre based photographic prints on papers not longer available on the market. With names like; Fortezo, Geavatone, Verdita or Ilfobrom they remind us of a lost world of silver halogenide abundance.
“As early as 1764 Immanuel Kant suggests the esthetic field of taste is, like a day, divided into two halves. The bright beauty of sunshine and the pale gleam of a sublime moon. On one hand the light pleasant positive Beauty, on the other the dangerous frightening majestic Sublime, rousing negative emotions close to dread and discomfort”.
Philosopher Pierre Guillet de Montoux in a text, accompanied the images in “SvD City” magazine January 1997.
The story was created with Bo Brinkenfalk when a debate about values in fashion (again) turned into moral panic. Fashion artists and photographers were blamed for causing eating disorders and other traumas. The publication resulted in death threats and invitations to talk-shows. Leading to nothing, but a recognition 10 years later of overweight as a potentially bigger health problem.
Johan Fowelin
“The Metro was one of the most significant architectural manifestations during the twentieth century. The aesthetic and social pathos of modernism expressed in a transport machinery. Transit and travel charged with not only a practical meaning; a metaphysical hope of a better life.
At the same time as the ideology of an epoch is unduly obtrusive in the pale fluorescent light of Metro underworld, I sense an end of an illusion and it´s social model”.
Johan Fowelin, April 28 1994.
Berlin November 1989. Exhibited at Moderna Muséet 1991, S:t Petersburg University 1992, Gothenburg Art Museum 2014 and Dunker Arthall, Helsingborg 2015.
Chemically contaminated images of useless scrap, slowly fading away from the few hope-full buyers at Gallery XXX in January 1989.
My contribution to political activism. An attempt to eliminate a nuclear power plant built exactly on the same location as my childhood paradise. Eventually I succeeded as the plant closed in 2005. With help from Maria and Claes.
A portrait of small town Lysekil. Sixty years later I wanted to finish August Sander´s project before the end of twentieth century. Permanent exhibition at Lysekil hospital.
Studio visit at Richard Brixel and Lillan Kullgren, preparing for exhibition at Södertälje Konsthall in November 1980.