In the summer of 2005, Anna Clarén moved to Småland to work as a teacher at the Photography School in Gamleby. At the same time, she found herself in a state of upheaval and confusion. She photographed her surroundings with a Hasselblad camera, and the result was around 60 images that were collected in the book Holding , winner of the Swedish Photo Book Award in 2006.

Her world of subjects was family, relationships, skin, aging bodies, naked bodies, nightmares. The images look like they are dissolving, most of it is unspoken and everything feels dreamlike. Some images are dark but almost all the subjects are bathed in a cyan-blue shimmer; a light that is both beautiful and unpleasant. The camera is turned towards one’s own life, everything we see is familiar but the images are unstable, you understand that it is about an inner crisis. But at the same time it is not a personal story, rather a depiction of how it can feel when everything falls apart. 

Holding life together

The title Holding is a concept in developmental psychology and means that another person ”holds together” one’s experience when one cannot. Like a parent, who not only carries but also ”holds together the world” for a newborn child. It was coined by the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. Perhaps the book and the photography itself became a way of holding together existence.

The book was also featured in 2014 in Martin Parr’s and Gerry Badger’s The Photobook: A History (vol. III).

The beauty in everyday life

20 years have passed and with many books and exhibitions behind her, she still takes her own life as her starting point and points the camera at her immediate family and the reality around her.

In the book Need to be needed (2023) there is a photograph that says a lot about Anna Clarén’s artistry. We see a greenhouse in a dark garden. A chain-link fence in the foreground, a street lamp far back in the picture illuminates the small empty greenhouse. Probably taken in the suburb of Bålsta where she lives. A sacred light falls on the inconspicuous motif.  

When asked about the greenhouse, she replies that in her everyday life she has difficulty finding time for existential questions, but that she ”must be able to see the beauty in this everyday life. When I can’t do that, I get angry. There is a driving force in it in the urgent everyday life. Like the empty greenhouse: it’s my job to make it sacred!”