Last fall, I revisited Berlin for a photographic project. It was the first real new city I moved to after having lived all my life in Stockholm up to that point. Returning was
strange: since leaving for good, I had only come back once, for a four day long vacation with my ex girlfriend. This time, I stayed for over a month and I was alone. I
rented a room in a shared apartment, close to a northern district. I felt at the same time estranged and at home. Places that I had seen multiple times before seemed
eerily similar to those years before – I had thought that, since I had changed a lot since then, Berlin would have as well. Of the friends that still lived in town, I only met up on a few occasions. I instead spent whole day walking around. The walks around the streets became a meditation on the conflict between the old and new, and
where my place should be in it.

Since beginning my studies in photography, there has been a lot of focus on the semiotic reading of pictures and how they connect to the bigger context of the art world. We read Sontag, Berger and Barthes to learn how to break down the photograph in order to see through its symbols and find its true character. I have grown tired of this way of seeing. Being the artistic medium with the greatest possibility for spontaneity, photography has something raw and uncultured about it. Photographs have the potential to evoke something visceral because of its ability to directly capture the feelings and intention of the user. This is the approach I had in mind during my month in Berlin. I used my camera as a tool for recording observations. In a way, it became a visual diary of my thoughts regarding my precarious situation. I never had any plan on what I was going to shoot and rather let my instincts guide me. Never did I critically think about what I was doing, if the pictures were to turn out good or how to put them all together: that was for when I got back again. I wanted to get lost in the moment, forget about the world at home.

The result of my month in Berlin became Fältjournalen, a self published book where I try to arrange and/or process the impressions from my stay. There is one black and
white photograph on the right hand side of every spread. Injected between some of them are hand writings from my literary diary that I kept at the same time, to give a bit more context to the story. The book is quiet, sober and reflective. It is made from an off white paper, with a cover of white watercolor paper to give it a rough texture.
The sides are torn and polished with a coarse sandpaper and the corners are rounded. The picture is a sticker, put directly onto the front cover. Everything to give it a feeling of being a journal that is slightly used and worn out. I would like for people to look through Fältjournalen and not be careful with it.