Emanuel Cederqvist

I’ve been afraid to write about this work for a long time, afraid that my thoughts will disappear the moment I start writing. Or that I, as soon as I begin to write, realize that there is nothing to write about. It’s like as if the idea of a project that is not concrete would appeal to me more than a piece of work that is done. I think it is for the same reason that I am still preoccupied with the meteorologist Emanuel Hofling’s disappearance. It is the unknown and incomprehensible that is the most interesting. That’s also why I like hiking – to be exposed to risk is also a way of being open to the unpredictable.

I’ve walked in Sarek National Park in the north of Sweden several times now. The photographs in this project are from these journeys. There are also photographs by Axel Hamberg, most of them taken between 1895 and 1914.

The pictures are part of his major project of mapping and exploring this relatively unknown part of the country. Many of the photos lack notes, and it is often unknown who is pictured or where and when the images were taken.

When I went through Hamberg’s archive, I noticed that we had not only been to the same places, but we had sometimes even taken the same pictures. Sarek as a landscape has not changed significantly since the last ice age receded around 10,000 years ago; thus the temporal difference between our photographs is almost invisible. The only things that have changed are our cameras and our diverse positions in the landscape.