Author Description

At art school in Paris Maja Forslund spent a lot time seated before croquis models, sketching their swiftly-moving poses every day for months. Those sessions have been the raw material of painters' careers for hundreds of years, teaching them to interpret and shape the human form, but when Forslund returned to the subject matter as a photographer, she broke new ground. The camera adds another dimension. Details that would be elided by the nature and speed of a sketch stick indelibly to her compositions, creating Surreal and often tragic portraits. Props seem to become the models' belongings--a pair of slippers, a fan and some spots of paint accrue meaning--and the circumstance of being naked in a crowd is revealed as bizarre. A man in the midst of easels and scattered stools recalls a survivor on a battlefield. Forslund was born in Stockholm in 1975, and this is her first book.