An Attempt at Visually Exhausting a Place in Malmö

Abstract

The work presented here is a photo-essay with images of, from, around and beyond a local square in Malmö; images that emerged from visual ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in September 2017. This fieldwork was developed around the idea of what a visual representation of the Scandinavian city would be, trying to look at it from a situated perspective that explored an ordinary place. In doing so, this photo- essay does not present a linear story. It rather describes the chosen place from a multifaceted perspective, each facet being a photograph of an object: a walking frame, a fungus, a flowerpot, a lamppost, a painting on a wall, a number, a water tank, a bird, a bench, a statue, a tower, a bridge, and so on. The essay explores the urban departing from Georges Perec’s attempt at exhausting of a place in Paris. In this case, however, a different methodology was performed. Rather than sitting in a café and writing up what was observed, I made visual registers and ‘followed the actors’ involved in those images, opening in each depiction a window for a new enquiry. The urban is, hence, presented as a subjective experience. It is framed, fragmented and mainly relational. The result is an ‘actor-network’ in which each image is a whole in itself and also part of other representations. The main objective of the essay is to present an open inconclusive body of questions—rather than a closed conclusive body of answers—that, ultimately, would give the reader a ‘partial’ yet meaningful impression of one city.