moom bookshop

Slowly but steadily we become immersed in what Henrik Malmström saw and photographed from the window of his living room. The pages of A Minor Wrongdoing unfold as a hypnotic sequence of candid shots taken at the neighbourhood of St. Georg in Hamburg, between 2011 and 2014. Hundreds of them, they record the last remains of street life in an urban area that is currently undergoing fierce gentrification after recent official law enforcement against street-based prostitution. Malmström used a cheap digital camera forcing its ISO levels to reproduce in each scene the raw effect of a surveillance cam. The grainy monochromatic material of his voyeuristic enterprise has been put together in this voluminous book replicating a messy police report archive. Printed in sharp dots, the grain adds a grade of unprecedented abstraction and beauty to the sequence whereas the quantity of images breaks with the conventional linear story structure. There is an uncanny feel in it. And obsession: the unconfessed obsession of a photographer who happened to be in the right place at the right time. We do not get to see much of what he photographed but we can still imagine pretty much happening in this obscure underworld of transactions.

Finnish photographer Henrik Malmström (b.1983) currently lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His work is often the result of the interaction with his immediate surroundings. In 2010 he self-published On Borrowed Time, his first book of photographs. In the same year he moved to Hamburg, Germany, where he developed and completed his two projects “A Minor Wrongdoing” and “Life is One Live it Well” by 2014. He is the co-founder and curator of the Müllkellergalerie, a premium art gallery located in a garbage room in Hamburg, Germany. In 2015 he co-founded the online platform Vaciarte, that deals with arts and politics in Buenos Aires.