Johan Engman with his Dürer monograph in Esperanto, Djupsjönäs 1957

Johan Engman, from the book The village with the blue house, Djupsjönäs 1957

From the short novel The Dreamer in the Blue House 
Sune Jonsson

“Emil the Dreamer is definitely a bit different than anyone else and people in my village are of the opinion that he could have become a professor. Emil’s strangeness is obvious, for it is reflected in the exterior of his house which is blue and located at the edge of the forest. But Emil has not always lived in a blue house. During the days of Old Man Emil the house was as red as his neighbor’s and all the other houses in the village. (…)

People in my village are not accustomed to dreamers; after all, dreamers are not needed.” (…)

“Everything was the schoolteacher’s fault. At least that was what Old Man Emil said and he hated Miss Karolina Karlsson for it. She read to the children from From Pole to Pole and made Emil fall in love with books. During Emil’s childhood the father had tried to suppress this budding folly and redeem the dreamer, but his eyes could not be everywhere. Emil simply disappeared. He read surreptitiously. Read throughout his school years in books lent to him by Miss Karolina Karlsson.”

Hjalmar Nygren, smallholder and sexton, Nyåker 1956

Cover of the book Images from the great migration, 1963

From the short novel The Fields of Långsele
Sune Jonsson

“The slump-shouldered brother, however, only talked about the fields he had seen in Långsele. The youngest brother was down at L. H. Persson’s to buy Danish pastries. The middle brother put a white linen towel over the clean pile of dishes. The slump-shouldered brother continued:

— You know. It was as smooth as a living room floor. There wasn’t a stone in sight. There hadn’t been forest around for many hundred years. Drain ditches had been dug everywhere. Things just grew. It just grew and the fields billowed against the sky. When I asked why they did not cut them they answered that there was no money in it. (…)

If they too would have been forced to work their fingers to the bone they would probably have thought that it was really worth the effort to bring in the barley. It was as yellow as gold. It billowed against the sky. It had been a good year for barley. Really good barley. Here we have always worried that frost would kill it. The grain was dense and full-eared but they said that it wasn’t worth cutting it. They just went here and there between the factories and talked about money. The only thing they talked about was money. They should have been put on a rock-strewn field like ours! Then they would probably have talked less about jobs with a salary.” 

Per-Erik Mårtensson, 4 years old, Norra Tresund, Vilhelmina 1961

“The ideal situation, of course, is that in which the photographer is his own client. Then the assignment is a vital function of the photographer himself; then his depiction of reality will occur at that point where he himself stands as a human being.  From every viewpoint, it must be an optimal advantage to be able to seek out the subject matter that is made up of one´s internal and external landscapes.”

Nine Reflections Concerning 1/125th

”My childhood was in the thirties and early forties. In the remaining visual picture of the cultivation region between the coast and the inland nearly every active man was a farmer. Histort was alive in the present without being noisy, the present time glided slowly and unnoticeably into history, a new generation took over already given forms. The movement of time was as natural and customary as when the farmer after the evening milking went in and sat down at the barley porridge of the evening. The cultivation region seemed stable, indestructible.

…

Permanence was an illution.” 

Jordabok 1976

”So many people around us are (seen as) anonymous, gray. They do not exist at all. I wanted to incorporate my village people into a larger context, to make them part of the world.”

From the film film Mot glömskans tyranni, 1982