Poppies
Winner at the 15th Annual Black & White Spider Awards 2020
1st Place - Outstanding Achievement in Still Life
About me
My father was a very good amateur photographer and he taught me to shoot and print pictures from when I was a child.
My first "photo projects" were made with father's Hasselblad. Then I got my first camera, a twin-lens reflex medium format camera. One of my first series of photos was of a dead shrew mouse, impaled by a Red-backed Shrike (Lanius collurio) on a hawthorn thorn, as they usually do to keep a supply for a rainy day.
That's how my fascination for photography started. I have thrived on taking pictures ever since. Some periods of my life I have also focused on painting. I used photographs as reference for my paintings and my experiments with abstract painting have since been references for photo projects. Personally I do not see any difference between painting and photography, they are just different techniques to tell a story.
And that's it. I'm just trying to tell a story that I think is worth telling. If I can reach and affect someone else with my stories, then even better.
My greatest interest in life has always been photography and painting, but I have never pursued it as a profession. I have managed a local government art and culture department, worked as a managing director at a college specialising in arts and later worked as a director of foundation studies at a college specialising in arts and crafts.
I live in Strömstad on the Swedish west coast, near the Norwegian border.
I work with black and white photography, mostly digital but also analogue. What I often focus on is the traces people leave behind in the form of objects, structures, buildings or the transformed landscape.
My pictures are not documentary, but more personal reflections. It is not the grand gestures or monuments that interest me, but the everyday imprints. All these marks people make in the world, which may have the illusion of being permanent, but which in time disappear into oblivion.
Klas Anders