Västervik, walls and colors

Västervik, Sweden, I visit the city where I lived when I was young. Walking the streets giving life to memories.  Find the house where I rented a garret. And the former printing works which became my studio for some years. Now the backyard is an open-air café. And my old studio is a family home, neatly wrapped in reddish-brown wood panelling with black corners. Then it was yellowish and the old plaster was cracked.

Childhood, youth and getting older. I am more than a grown-up person and all houses in this little city are decorated with light opaque paints: yellow, blue, green, rose. People have a better life, are healthier and earn more money. That is good.

Still I am happy to find the maybe very last house that has not yet got choked by plastic paint, but is breathing and telling a story.

Children like things inspiring imagination. I recognize the child within me, and that's a good feeling.

Lac Retba, salt and sand

Lac Retba, sixty kilometers northwest of Dakar, 800 meters from seaside is Lac Retba, or Lac Rose. The pink colored lake. Just today it's not like that, the color is blue like the sky. Some hundred years ago growing and moving sand dunes separated this part of the sea from the big one and the small lake was created. It's ten times salter than the Dead Sea. 

People collect the salt from the bottom and fill the boats. Women carry the salt on their heads on and off. Hard job, hot sun and salt biting the skin. This can bring eight, nine dollars a day. During summer there is no activity here because of the rain.

Dakar, a place for pray

Dakar, outside Le Méridien, the conference center. When you need it there is always a place for pray.

Dakar, a place for a sculpture

Dakar, Placing an art object in public space is usually a matter of longterm discussion. There are arguments about this and that. I walk along the road in the western outskirts of the city when this smiling sculpture appears. The environment is far from being a park, on the contrary: sand, stones, trash all around. Still the female sculpture is quietly sitting here. And still she smiles.

Dakar, while time is passing

Dakar, sometimes you can't see the picture in what you see. You are not really regarding things around you that you see everyday – they just are there. At a foreign place uniqueness appears. There is no consistency, no logic. On the roof is a man sitting, as if waiting. Below on the ground is a uniformed man walking off and on. Beside the man on the roof is a winch with a thick rope. At the end of the rope is a bucket.

In my newly arrived brain it all becomes a unique installation. Where a guard is carefully watching a bucket while a yougalike man meditates on a roof. While time is passing.

Stockholm, protesting, too much nature?

Stockholm, the month of May is hysteric. Bird cherries, lilacs, elder bushes, horse chestnuts all around and when looking downwards every tuft of grass is transformed into a bunch of multicolored flowers. The scents of nature are drugs, you get drunk. Also, more jobs to do in professional life than at other times of the year, and more in private life you want to experience. And people are like crazy heifers let out in the green for the first time ever.

There is a cherry tree covered with thousands of flowers making my camera hand like paralysed. Just around the corner a display window, discreetely decorated with some electrified plastic tulips. A quiet protest against the time being?

New York, media bird

New York, When being a tourist equipped with a camera you make choices. If you don't want to think, there are road maps with camera symbols marking big views where you are recommended to stop the car, jump out and snap a shot. I think that is really stupid and imagine myself creative and artistic enough to find my own unique views. 

Last Sunday when looking through a Swedish newspaper there was something about visiting New York. Above the text a huge photo from the top of the Empire State Building I met an old friend from my own visit there last summer: A pigeon in focus, strolling around up there close to the tourists. And at once I realize that this pigeon is a movie star and an exceptional media bird, in focus of thousands of cameras every single day. Time to put a pigeon symbol just here on the NY map? The pigeon star is waiting for you, and only for you.