One picture at a time

This is the first monograph to cover the five decades of Gunnar Smolianksy's prolific photographic career. With an idiosyncratic style, he favors the abject commonplace: a fly next to a glass of water, a threadbare tassel, a worn out office chair, a close-up of a fork and a few crumbs, a broken swing... With a quiet focus on small (and sometimes pathetic) moments, he also finds beauty: a plant taking root in a glass of water on a window sill, a watery reflection in a highly-polished floor, a single cloud hovering above the horizon between water and sky... Smolianksy is one of the leading voices of Swedish photography. For the past 50 years, he has taken the occasional commission as a freelance photographer, but has remained steadfastly focused on his own work. This long-overdue monograph accompanies a major retrospective of his work at the world-famous Hasselblad Center in Goteborg, Sweden.