Hasselblad user Erik Johansson is a Swedish photographer working in the ‘surreal’ genre, currently based in Prague. He doesn’t capture moments, he captures ideas.
Erik’s work will be exhibited at Fotografiska museum in Stockholm, Sweden through 10th of April. At the same time he will be releasing his new book: Imagine (Max Ström Publishing house).
As a real Hasselblad devotee, Erik uses his Hasselblad H5D-40 medium format camera to capture and realize all the creative concepts in his mind.
“The reality I portray exists, but on a different scale,” he says. “It has become my life’s mission to create these worlds, all these ideas that I have and that I want to live out and to actually see it happening. I’m passionate about inspiring others to dare to live out their fantasies and to create something that inspires them and to challenge one-way thinking. To raise questions”, says Erik Johansson.
“I want to be for photography what Bob Hund is for the music scene. This band, that sees things the other way around and whose lyrics consist of combinations of totally unexpected themes makes it normal to be abnormal, and with the right to exist.”
Johansson runs a completely different form of staged photography in which he largely builds models. Johansson constructs objects from what he has around him: Cardboard rolls, flour, water and food coloring, or why not a little coco-flakes for the structure’s sake? Together these basic analogy blocks build the things that before was just in his magical inner world: A lonely man living in air, a tree on the way down through a waterfall of grass, a road that is pulled up with a zipper.
All built on a small scale where Johansson then uses Photoshop as his brush to assemble the components into an artistic work. Johansson himself was already at a young age inspired by photography and surrealist artists such as Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Elsa Beskow and Sven Nordqvist, all for their ability to tell imaginative stories. A tradition he manages well with his work that question reality and makes us ask ourselves the mind-evoking question: Why could it not be like this? And if so, how much more impossible may actually be possible?
Feature image (on top): Soundscapesm by Erik Johansson
Created Reality in Stockholm, compiled by Admin from Fotografiska and Hasselblad
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