Martin Bogren is a Swedish photographer whose work stems from a personal, subjective approach. His work has been widely exhibited and published in several monographs; Tractor Boys 2013, Italia 2016, August Song 2019, Passenger 2021 and Metropolia 2022. His work is reprecented in several collections, including Bibliothèque du Nationale – Paris, Oregon Fine Art Museum and at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockhom. Martin is a member of Galerie VU´ in Paris since 2013 and member of the Temps Zero grup since 2018.
The only response doing justice to Martin Bogren’s photographic works must be poetic, cinematic and musical, for these are the qualities that immediately spring to mind when seeing Bogren’s haunting, dream-like images. These images, in their unsharpness more suggestive than descriptive, remind me of the magic of very early photography. In the modest book Hollow (2020) there is a photograph of gaping black hole, shaped like a haystack or the back of long-haired woman’s head, in and old wall. The hole eats up most of the image, while in the lower left corner sits a ladder pointing into the dark mystery. It is an image as telling, as pregnant with hidden meaning, as an early William Henry Fox Talbot. Next to landscapes and still lifes, there are portraits through which unknown people look at us from the unfathomable depths of time. Since his well-received book Tractor Boys (2013), a lyrical portrait of youngsters in the Swedish countryside racing their tractor-cars during warm summer nights, Bogren’s photographic series are hard to pin down thematically. His books carry titles that could as well have been titles for poetry volumes, like August Song (2019), Hollow (2020), and Passenger (2021). What these series are about doesn’t seem to matter as much as the sharing of the joy and mystery of observation. In a sense these photographs are, in John Berger’s phrase, ‘quotations of appearances,’ yet they convey more than just surfaces. The photography critic Sean O’Hagan called Bogren ‘a master of the everyday sublime,’ and it is the sublime that I would like to emphasize. The mundane in Bogren’s photographs is permeated with the enigma of life, encounter and observation.
— Taco Hidde Bakker, spring 2021
Although the early work of Martin Bogren can be categorized as documentary photography, he has since developed a personal and poetic writing that gets more defines as his research progresses.In his imaginary of dreamlike and sometimes disturbing wanderings, by his subtle prints all in shades of grey, he puts into action a sensitive affirmation of his subjective visions.The book holds an important place in his creative process,ltalia, published by Max Ström in 20’l 6 has been widely acclaimed by critics and his current project on summer balls in the Swedish countryside, to which he has dedicated many years, and whose model is being finalized, confirms both the evolution of his writing and the privileged relationship his work has with the book.His New York-based project, which has recently begun, is taking a new direction, with the first shift to colour, alternating with the black-white, to express the feeling of strangeness that passes through it when it is lost in the North American city. His vividly illuminated images, full of striking portraits and invisible faces, celestial visions and misplacedness set the beginnings of a powerful and contagious body of work.
— Caroline Benichou Galerie VU