De Geer: Photographs 1959-1980

by Johan Kugelberg (Editor), Carl Johan De Geer (Illustrations)

Born in 1938 to a powerful Swedish aristocratic family, Carl Johan De Geer grew up on a grand country estate, went to art school in the late 1950s and, in an epic act of rejection, became an underground artist, musician, author, filmmaker and photographer documenting Sweden’s 1960s–80s leftist bohemia. (He also exposed his grandmother’s Nazi sympathies in a film called Mormor, Hitler och jag (Grandmother, Hitler and I). A master of the Leica M4 snapshot in the vein of Ed van der Elsken and Daido Moriyama, De Geer captures the world with intimate informality, in black-and-white photographs that, in this slim, affordable volume (most of De Geer’s previous photo books are out of print and extremely rare), are beautifully reproduced on heavy-weight newsprint, in an informal zine style.

80 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 2014