Gunnar Smoliansky

In December 2019, the footsteps of Gunnar Smoliansky fell silent on the streets of Stockholm. His photographic career began as early as the 1950s, and since then, Smoliansky's wanderings in the city have resulted in a multitude of minimalist snapshots of Stockholm and its inhabitants.

Many of his images have over time become iconic time documents that show an architecture and city life completely different from today's, despite only a few decades separating them. A prime example is the auction's piece Slussen, 1952. The twenty-four photographs of Slussen were taken when Smoliansky was nineteen years old and on his way home from his job as a night watchman at Stadsgårdskajen. These images of Slussen included in the auction's work demonstrate Smoliansky's skill as a photographer to capture the city's unique iconography. In 1987, Carl-Johan Malmberg reflected on Smoliansky's Slussen images when they were exhibited at the Lido cinema in Stockholm. "Exemplary: if there is a center in Gunnar Smoliansky's world of images, it is perhaps Slussen in Stockholm with its stairs, bridges, railings, railway tracks, streets. A little girl urinating in a backyard on Söder, a tram in São Paulo, a pine forest in Hälsingland are random points on the concentric circles that emanate from there. Also, time is concentric: images from the early fifties – the boys' hairstyles and caps, a chip basket – become strangely contemporary. No film of bygone time exists any longer between us and them. Perhaps reality for Gunnar Smoliansky is a series of intimately connected rooms, small points of light in time."