Lonesome-Twosome on the Line
Last weekend I took part in this year’s edition of Linan (The Line), a one day photo exhibition put up in a big party tent by the photo club in Kävlinge, Sweden. I had a great time showing black and white street photos on a theme I really liked picking photos for!
Pride on the streets
With about a month and a half of delay today I am sharing the photos I took at this year’s Pride Parade in Malmö, Sweden. As usual the parade was the conclusion of Pride week in town on a Saturday.
Busy market day!
Summer is market season in my part of the world and over the years I think I’ve been to almost all of them at one point. One blank spot in my market memory was the one in Sjöbo*, even though it probably is the second largest attendance of all the province’s markets after the one in Kivik (I’ve not seen official numbers but the expectation was for 100,000 visitors over two days, so that will give you an idea). So to remedy my lack of visits to this market I convinced my photo buddy (a.k.a. Dad) that we should drive the half-hour east and experience this market.
Pride in the rain
At the start of July it was once again time for the Pride parade to make its way through the city of Malmö, and I was there to document the event. I definitely enjoy photographing at Pride, and to be there to show my support for the cause. To me it’s utterly incomprehensible the way we are still, in the year 2025, having people who are so incredibly intolerant and stuck in their old ways and can’t accept that other people have other lives to lead, lives that won’t affect their own in any way whatsoever!
Festival Days are here again!
For the last almost 40 years (minus the Covid years) there’s been a city festival in Malmö, Sweden during the first half of August, and this year was not an exception. For a week (Friday to Friday) the city is full of concerts, food trucks, cultural events and lots and lots of market stalls selling all kinds of (mostly unnecessary) things. So of course I had to take a bus into the center of the city to photograph at this event.
Here comes the Pride parade!
Taking a bus to the center of Malmö to photograph and show support for the annual Pride parade has become a part of the summer “ritual” for me in the last ten years or so (Covid years excluded of course) and it’s always fun! For a street photographer who often converts his photos to black and white it is also a welcome change in the photos into all colors of the rainbow (and then some!). As I always write though, it’s not just a celebration of everyone’s right to self-expression and love, it is also a protest and a show of strength and unity. I like seeing that!
Cars upon cars upon cars
Right from the start I will say that I am NOT much of a car person. I don’t care which car on the market has the most horse powers or what different versions of a certain car brand there are, so spending time photographing cars and posting a lot of colorful images of them online may seem slightly out of character for me. That is true, if we’re talking modern cars, but I do like seeing old cars’ design and the way people fix them up, many cars being close to 60 or more years old!
Season closer by the seaside
In my photo club we have a tradition of finishing the spring semester with an outdoor event with hot dogs, beer and a short little photowalk, and this year was no exception. We were originally going to meet up in the largest park in Malmö, Sweden, but had to relocate at the last minute because we realized that there’d be a huge running event through that park and the area where we’d set up our portable grills. That would not have worked, so it was a good thing there was a different place, where we’d been before, that worked very well.
It's Festival time again!
It’s August and the kids are returning to school, according to ancient traditions, and according to traditions, but not quite ancient ones yet, it was time for the Malmö Festival to happen. From Friday to Friday the center of town is full of market stalls, food trucks, carnival rides and various performances on several stages. Previous years I’ve done multiple visits to the festival and photographed performances in several locations. This year though I settled with a walk in the city, shooting some street photography among the many visitors to the festival.
Out in the streets of Skåne
This summer, after I came home from my delightful (but too short) trip to the US I’ve gone on a few little “day trips” to do some street photography here and there, but not to the extent I used to do before the pandemic. I guess I’m still trying to re-kindle that flame, that urge to spend hours upon hours out on the streets, snapping hundreds of photos, then you find those rare gems among them during editing. I’m getting there though…step by step I suppose.
Rainbows...lots and lots of rainbows!
At the risk of repeating last year’s blogpost too much I must say that I do enjoy shooting at the Pride Parade in Malmö, Sweden. It’s such a celebration of diversity and inclusion and letting everyone be who they really are. However, when I walked around the warm-up area next to the City Library I couldn’t really feel the enthusiasm I’d felt last year, the first time since the pandemic that the Parade was back. That had nothing to do with the Parade or the subjects in front of me, it was all me. I recently came home from a three week trip to the USA where I ended up shooting several hundred pictures (still to be processed)…so I guess I was a bit photo-ed out.
Analog days are here again
Ever since the modern plague descended upon us in 2020 I’ve put one aspect of my photography on the back burner, namely analog photography. It wasn’t an intentional choice in any way, in fact it was something that dawned on me several months into it. “Tomas, you’re not shooting your old film cameras…is that something we want to change?” It turned out that, nope I was fine with letting them and my rolls of film in the fridge be for the time being. Of course I didn’t think we’d still be in pandemic mode (sort of) at the start of 2023, I figured we’d be back to normal long ago!
Festival at the Harbor
For the past three years the number of public events have been somewhat limited (for obvious reasons) so seeing more and more festivals, concerts and other public events take place is a good sign for sure! That’s why I suggested to my dad we go to the recently re-kindled Harbor Festival in Limhamn (a part of the city of Malmö in Sweden), an event we’d gone to a few times before the plague descended upon the world.
Back in "business"...or are we?
This last weekend I did my first in-person photographers’ brunch and photowalk in 18 months. I’ve been very careful about not doing anything like that until I’d had my two shots so when I passed the two week wait period after my second Pfizer shot I thought “okay, I guess I am free to do this thing now”. I must admit I felt both joy as well as trepidation about doing this sort of thing again after so long of being a social recluse (sort of anyway).
Street photography again...I'm so rusty!
For the duration of the pandemic I’ve stayed away from one of my favorite types of photography…street photography. I’ve always enjoyed walking around city streets, camera at the ready to capture something interesting that people do in an urban setting…not so much during 2020 and 2021 so far, because of obvious reasons. In fact I’ve only done three or four walks in a major city, camera in hand since March of 2020 and I miss it! Now though, as more and more people get both shots of the vaccine I think I will do more of my favorite type of photography!