Helena And The Sea – Photography
I’m a photographer born and raised in the north of Sweden. While growing up in Norrbotten I was happily enjoying the comfort of our beautiful tranquil home and also, enjoying the nature of Tornedalen that the area is called. Swimming in the cold waters of Torne River was one of my favourite past times to do. I’ve always loved water, I remember my parents putting a big bathtub on the floor of our sauna. I was sitting in that bathtub until my fingers looked like raisins. Growing up I imagined I would continue my life in Tornedalen forever.
The notion of staying in Tornedalen for the rest of my life changed when I visited Stockholm around the time I was 10. I fell in love with Stockholm. I remember the exact moment that happened, we were driving in a road tunnel heading to an amusement park called Gröna Lund. It was a wow-moment for me. Something I’ve only seen in movies, now I was living in that movie. I’ve always been aware of the big world outside of Norrbotten, my grandparents emigrated to Michigan in The US, I grew up looking at those photos of my ancestors lives over the. Growing up I never really thought about travelling. But, I guess that travelling is in my genes, there might be some Sami influence in me since I feel the nomadic urge to move around. When I’ve been travelling and moving around I’ve always have had a very stable and secure home back in Sweden which is why I’ve been able to take some risks. After I fell in love with Stockholm, moving to the city was part of my plans for the future. So I did, one week after finishing high school I was living and working in Stockholm.
As I continued my life in Stockholm, studying at university and working as a project manager, my desire to travel and see the world continued to grow. I applied for a fellowship a couple of years after finishing my degree in business at Stockholm University. I got the fellowship, I was going to study at Pace University in New York. The university is a stone throw away from The Brooklyn Bridge and a couple of blocks away from where the ferries to Ellis Island. Ellis Island is the place where my grandmother arrived after an extremely long journey from Tornedalen, she was on a boat that carried timber from the woods of the north, stopping at every paper mill town along the coast of Sweden south to Stockholm. I had thought that my grandfather also arrived at Ellis Island but when I looked into the few records that are of their time in Michigan I found out that he arrived in Boston.
One of the circles of my life was beginning to close during my time in New York, but I wanted to visit Michigan where they lived and worked. The trip to Michigan happened a couple of years later. It was an amazing experience. Driving around the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and imagining my grandparents life there. It hit me that they might have been considered rock stars when they returned to the small village in the forest where my grandfather grew up. But, it’s not the ways of people of the north of Sweden to behave like the rock stars they are.
By travelling I also feel that I’m fulfilling some of my fathers dreams. He was one generation closer to my grandparents and knew all their stories of them travelling to The US with the hopes of making a better life for themselves. I always felt he wanted to travel but was a bit too scared, he was also very tied to our home in Norrbotten. By travelling and seeing the world I’m not only fulfilling my dreams, I’m fulfilling my fathers travel dreams too. During our family road trips from the north of Sweden to the south, and back again, my father always wanted to go home. Those trips were so fast. I’m more of a “stay for a long time” kind of traveller. Guess that’s why I’ve lived in India a total of more than 2 years, I’ve stayed to get the full experience not just something you get a glimpse of from a car window passing by.
I grew up travelling through photographs, that’s probably why I take photos. I want to pass the experience of how the world looks on to other people.
If you’re not able to travel in real life just yet, you can travel through photographs and maybe one day you’ll get to experience the photographs in real life.
