In the project Best of Sweden, Ulf Lundin has photographed the same scene from early morning before dawn until it gets dark again in the evening. The final image is composed of different parts from a selection of exposures he took during the day. It can be night in one corner of the picture, noon in another and a small detail can be illuminated by the early morning light. A whole day compressed into one image.
The title of the project alludes to the subjective choices Lundin makes when deciding which parts of the photographs to use in the final composition, but also to the places he chooses to photograph. Photography is in many cases used to confirm our view of the world around us. Lundin has chosen common and unremarkable places, which we may not usually associate with the image of Sweden. They are not made for the eye, but here they are presented in an idealized light. The project raises the question about what a photograph is and how we perceive it, but also about the environment surrounding us and how we influence, and are influenced by it.
When I first started the project, I thought that the images would be more difficult to read and accept as photographs. Even if every work in the series consists of between 50 and 200 fragments from different photographs, I think that we read them as photographs and not as a painting or a more obviously manipulated image. It says something about how we relate to photography. Even if we know that a photographic image is no evidence of truth we look at them and understand them in a unique way. They are as André Bazin put it ”a hallucination that is also a fact”. Photography is good at capturing a brief moment. It is of course interesting to try to do the opposite.
–Ulf Lundin
