Dimma Brume Mist was born from over two hundred binders containing thousands of contact sheets and negatives.
Over the course of five years, JH Engström periodically returned to this archive, mining deep within the overlooked to search for the common thread running throughout his 35 years of image making.
His ambition was not to create a “best of” collection, nor a summary of previous books, but to create something else entirely. The result is Dimma Brume Mist, an epic book of previously unpublished photographs and texts.
“I had a conviction that it is not within the ‘good image’ that poetry lives, but rather in movement, energy, searching and doing. A conviction about the power of getting close when perfection is not reached. The dizziness that comes when the fumbling continues even though it will never result in a final answer. The beauty of that fumbling.”
The framework of a book emerged in the early stages of Engström’s excavation of his archive. He began forming pairs and sequences of images that oscillated between opposite and complementary elements such as rural and urban, movement and stillness, inner and outer, security and insecurity, child and adult, reflection and impulse, self and other, nature and civilisation. As the book evolved, a second type of oscillation developed between images and words, forming the building blocks of the book.
The texts, reproduced in Swedish, French and English, are short, stripped down notes referring to childhood memories, random thoughts that arose in connection with Engström’s artistic search, or fragments of an ongoing inner monologue. He views the images as the engine and the texts as a braking system, preventing the reader from rapidly flipping through the book and missing them. All the images are vertical, referencing books beyond the defined category of the photobook, leaving Dimma Brume Mist uncategorisable.
To maintain simplicity and directness, the images in the book have been scanned directly from the contact sheets and are presented without captions. They are undusted, and scratches, damage and other traces of time have been left exactly as they appeared when the contact sheet was removed from the binder. The imperfections of the images reflect the weathering and disintegration of memory over time.
About JH Engström
JH Engström (born 1969 in Karlstad) is a Swedish photographer and video artist who lives between Paris and Värmland. Raised between the Swedish countryside and Paris, this early contrast shaped a deeply introspective vision grounded in lived experience. After settling in Stockholm in the 1990s, he shared a darkroom with Anders Petersen and later spent time in New York at Robert Frank’s studio.
Engström’s practice rejects formal rules in favor of freedom and experimentation. Working intuitively across black and white and color, as well as instantaneous and staged images, he embraces accident and technical play to question photography itself. From the 2000s onward, his work expanded to include video, installation, books, and writing, dissolving hierarchies between media and infusing his imagery with a lyrical and poetic quality.
At the core of his work lies an autobiographical exploration of vulnerability, solitude, empathy, and everyday experience. His photographs, whether portraits, self portraits, still lifes, or landscapes, form an intimate visual journal that speaks in a universal language. In 2012, he co founded Atelier Smedsby with Margot Wallard, a workshop dedicated to critical exchange around photographic practice. Engström has exhibited widely, published 25 monographs, and received major international awards, establishing him as a central figure in contemporary photography. [Official Website]
