Lonesome-Twosome on the Line
One of the cat statues at the stairs near the canal in Malmö, Sweden during a very high water level
The title for this blogpost might look a bit strange, but after reading the rest of it I am thinking it will make at least a few percent more sense. Last weekend I was able to take part in Linan “The Line”, a one day exhibition put on by the Kävlinge Photo Club. It is held in a big party tent set up in a local park so your photos are protected from rain and most winds.
The “Lonesome-Twosome” part of the title is simply the theme I chose for my pictures this year. I was very happy with the theme I had last year - “Dogs in our Human World” - and I struggled to come up with something as good. Then at the beginning of summer I was looking through my Lightroom catalog and found these two pictures, taken during the same outing in 2024; in fact they were taken less than 50 meters apart on the beach in Lomma, Sweden. As soon as I saw them I realized that I had my theme, and these two would have to be part of the group of pictures chosen!
I had a whole HEAP of potentials, maybes and possibles after the first archive trawling session!
I set up a collection in Lightroom Classic and began adding any and all pictures I thought were potential candidates and of course I ended up with a ridiculous amount of images (I’ve been photographing street since the early 2000s so there’s tens of thousands of pictures in my photo library). I think my first run-through gave me close to 300 candidates and that would be “just a bit much” for the exhibition! I’ve used Lightroom since it was version 2.0, but this was the first time I actually got around to using the color and star rating tools to come up with my final selects, and I think I will use it again, because it was pretty intuitive once I started filtering the images with these tools!
This was the picture I chose to represent my photos on the “introductory line” that people walked by entering the tent.
Eventually I landed on 28 pictures for my exhibition (plus one for the introductory line where we all shared one photo as a “teaser”). With my father’s 25 photos on a line right opposite me it was quite a hefty package to pick up at the post office, but when I saw all our photos printed at A3 size it was all worth it! I so thoroughly enjoy seeing my photos in print, because it is such a different thing than seeing them on a computer screen. Somehow the prints feel like a “final” product, while the computer screen version feels more like a “work” version.
The instructions were for us to be at the location at 10 AM to set up the exhibition for a 12 PM opening. I’ve done this event a few times already so I know that 2 hours might seem excessive, but those minutes are well spent on setting up your exhibition and also taking a peek at what the other photographers put on show before the general public start to show up. By the time noon rolls in there’s usually quite a crowd that starts walking around, looking at and commenting on the pictures.
This year was unfortunately a bit unusual for me too, since for the first time I would not take part in this event together with my father. He became quite seriously ill at the start of the month (thankfully on the mend now though), and was unable to participate in person. As he had chosen the photos he wanted to show just before his illness I thought it extra important to have his pictures there, even if he could not be there.
That of course meant that this year I had two exhibitions to put up, and it did get slightly hectic at the end. All my thanks to the “line neighbors” (a.k.a. the photographers who showed pictures on the other side of mine) Rei and Anders who were very helpful adjusting their photos so I could put mine and dad’s photos up as well!
Cell phone panorama of what my setup at the exhibition ended up looking like.
My father’s exhibition with images from a local university park that were on display right across from mine.
I found this year’s edition of The Line was probably the best one I’ve been a part of (this was my 4th time), because so many of the photographers had put quite some effort into picking a theme or an idea for their exhibition. To me it’s always been important to narrow down the scope of what I want to show - be it pictures from Mackinac Island like I did in 2023, images from Texas and the 2024 eclipse there or my street photos of dogs that I showed last year. I would never pick say 20 street photos at random; I need a theme or a hook at least. So many of the 20 photographers taking part this year had done exactly that.
I saw an excellent collection of photos based on cigars (who knew you could do an exhibition on that?), a whole exhibition on tractor pulling and one all about bread. I hope that the people signing up for the 2027 event will continue to do such an excellent job at great variety in both themes as well as photo styles!
Unlike previous years I did not go around and snap all that many photos of my own of the event, nor did I do a walkthrough video like I’ve done in the past. There were just a bit too many people around our photos for me to want to bother them with sticking a camera into their immediate vicinity. So the cell phone panoramas of our exhibitions will be the only actual photos from the event that I am going to share today. I will however share a few of the pictures I actually showed to the general public. I decided to hang them in “pairs”, one “Lonesome” and one “Twosome” to emphasize the difference between the two moods/settings/vibes (call it what you like). In the exhibition the pairs were vertical on the line, but in this post I’ve chosen to put them next to each other instead.
