The photographer Johan Fowelin, born in Lund and raised in Södertälje, worked as the art gallery’s photographer in 1976 – 82. For a long time, starting in 1989, he worked on the project to document the Stockholm metro. “The subway in Stockholm symbolized everything I longed for when I grew up in a small town.”

He could use a long exposure time, sometimes up to 30 seconds, so that passers-by would not get caught in the picture. In other contexts, man is clear, part of the story’s narrative. In 2008, “An evening in the subway” was shown in the art gallery’s Södertälje-room (Södertäljerummet). Large format photos. A large part of these are included in the municipality’s art collection. Like most of the collection, they can be rented / deposited to the municipality’s offices and businesses.

Seen in a modernist context, Fowelin philosophizes in a quote:

”The Metro was one of the most significant architectural manifestations during the twentieth century. The aesthetic and social pathos of modernism expressed in transport machinery. Transit and travel charged with not only a practical meaning; a metaphysical hope of a better life.

At the same time as the ideology of an epoch is unduly obtrusive in the pale flourescent light of Metro underworld, I sense an end of an illusion and it´s social model ”.

At the same time, Fowelin’s project has become a document of a time that has flown by. Where subway signs, people’s phones, briefcases or clothes have long since been replaced.

Sources: Södertälje konsthalls archive folder, text and compilation Anneli Karlsson.