The magazine of the photo-essay
“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!”
Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film maker
by John Alinder
John Alinder, son of a farmer, was born in 1878 in the village of Sävasta, Altuna
parish, in Uppland, a province in eastern central Sweden. Alinder remained in the village
all his life. He chose not to take over his parents’ farm and instead became a self-taught
photographer and jack of all trades. He was a music lover, holder of the Swedish agency
for the British record label and gramophone brand His Master’s Voice. For a time he
ran a rural shop from his home, and he even operated an illicit bar for a while. From
the 1910s to the 1930s he portrayed the local people, the landscape around them and
their way of life. He often photographed them in their homes and gardens, using the
technology of the time, glass plates.
These he developed in a small darkroom he had built and then made the prints in the
sunlight. The Alinder collection was “discovered” in the 1980s when a curator found
over 8,000 glass plates stacked away in a library basement. Children placed on chairs,
people perched in trees, labourers, confirmation candidates and old ladies; often
depicted against a background of foliage and sprawling greenery penetrated by
sunlight. Alinder’s portraiture allows for the magic of chance, both liberating and
defining the subjects.
Often they are looking straight into the camera. As if they can see us. As if their gaze can travel the hundred years or so
that lie between their time and ours. As if they were saying, “You are alive now, but we were once alive.”