Dimma Brume Mist, JH Engström

'Dimma Brume Mist’ was born from over two hundred binders containing thousands of contact sheets and negatives. Over the course of five years, JH Engström periodically returned to this archive, mining deep within the overlooked to search for the common thread present throughout his 35-years of image-making. His ambition was not to create a ‘best of’ collection, nor a summary of previous books, but to create something else entirely. The result is ‘Dimma Brume Mist’—an epic book of previously unpublished photographs and text.

The framework of a book emerged in the early stages of Engström’s excavation of his archive. He began forming pairs and sequences of images which oscillated between opposite and complementary elements such as between rural / urban, movement / stillness, inner / outer, security / insecurity, child / adult, reflection / impulse, self / other, nature / civilisation. As the book evolved a second type of oscillation developed between images and words—forming the building blocks for the book.

The texts—reproduced in Swedish, French and English—are short, stripped down simple notes either referring to childhood memories, random thoughts which arose in connection with Engström’s artistic search or ongoing inner monologue. He views the images as the engine and the texts as a braking system, preventing the reader from rapidly flipping through the book so as not to miss them.  All the images are vertical to reference books beyond the defined category of photobook—leaving ‘Dimma Brume Mist’ uncategorisable.

To maintain a simplicity and directness, the images in the book have been scanned straight from the contact sheets and are presented without captions.  They are undusted and scratches, damage and other traces of time have been left exactly as they were when the contact sheet was removed from the binder. The imperfection of the images is symptomatic of the weathering and disintegration of memory with time.

Published by Void
Softcover
672 pages
202 x 250 mm
ISBN 9786185479428