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Wandering in an imaginary city, Metropolia invites the viewer on a dreamlike stroll punctuated by enigmatic encounters. The urban space is apprehended in fragments, guessed over the silhouettes that we cross there. Mists, exploded grains, sometimes saturated lights, shades of grey, monochrome colors playing with cold blues or warm oranges, with Bogren the visual experience becomes sensitive. He brings in color photographs for the first time, which punctuate the B&W: The use of color was a way to rebel against myself, as the photographer explains in the interview of the book, to see if I could do something totally new. With black-and-white, I started to know a little too much about what I was doing, while color was like a foreign language that I learned slowly. But to tell you the truth, my color images are very monochromatic.

Capturing intimacy, expressing the fragile, showing the impermanence of things: Martin Bogren's visual universe reveals the illusion of the world. His images capture on their surface a reality that dissolves but that the art of the photographer has been able to capture in extremis, by stealth.

Born in 1967, Martin Bogren lives and works between Malmö, in Sweden, and Berlin, in Germany. Since the 1990’s, he develops a singular photographic practice in which the work in laboratory holds a major place. Lights, grains, textures, muted colors, evanescent figures compose a world between illusion and palpable presence. In the course of his travels, Bogren seizes fragile moments: landscapes, urban world and human presences seem to disappear on the surface of the photographic image. Particularly involved in the narrative process of his books, Bogren conceives each of them like visual poems, each image is chromatically adjusted according to its position in the visual sequence.

His previous publications, including "Tractor Boys" (2013), "August Song" (2019) and "Passenger" (2021), have all been acclaimed by the critics. His photographs appear in pretigious collections, including the one of Fotografiska Museet (Stockholm), of the Oregon Art Museum (Portland) as well as from the Bibliothèque nationale de France. .