Steel Work City
Rikard Laving
Journal
English and Swedish
Softcover
104 pages
210 x 260 mm
2012
ISBN 9789197887670
In the late 1950’s and early 60’s the town of Oxelösund was rebuilt to fit the needs of the Steel producing industry, SSAB, and the five thousand people working there. Thus, most of the public buildings and residences are from this period and they still, pretty much, look exactly the same as they did when they were built. Therefore, both the architecture and the infrastructure of Oxelösund, to a large degree, embodies the social and political ideas of the Swedish society in the 50’s and 60’s.
Today, nearly 50 years later the number of people employed at SSAB is cut in half but the steel industry is still, by far, the main employer in Oxelösund and therefore exceptionally important for the whole economy in the region. Consequently, a lot has changed in Sweden over the last 50 years, but Oxelösund is still much the same.
Rikard Laving’s bleak color photographs are as taken out of a time-capsule.
(source: https://journal-photobooks.com/products/rikard-laving-steel-work-city)
About the Artist
Rikard Laving born in 1978, is a self-taught photographer that lives in Nyköping. In 2002 Rikard started working on his first large scale project, documenting the all year camping called Flatenbadet outside Stockholm. After two years at the camping he got in touch with the Swedish photographer Anders Petersen who became his mentor until the project was finished. The photos were published by Journal as the book CARAVAN in the autumn of 2007.
In 2008 he started working on documenting the steel producing city of Oxelösund and in the spring 2012 the project was published as the book STEEL/WORK/CITY by Journal. The text in the book is written by Swedish poet and artist Mattias Alkberg.
In 2015 Svenska Fotoantikvariatet released his third book PERMANENT VACATION and in 2018 ABSTRACT DIALOGUE was publiched by Blackbook Publication.
Rikard is represented by gallery VÚ and currently working on finishing the series MENTAL and numerous other projects and collaborations.
https://www.rikardlaving.com/index.html
(source: https://www.rikardlaving.com/cv.html)
About the Publisher
Journal was founded by Gösta Flemming in 1991 with an aim to publish photo books. Based in Sweden.
https://journal-photobooks.com/
(source: https://journal-photobooks.com/pages/about)
