Black and white photographs from American journeys between 1989 and 2012. With his intuitive gaze steering towards the netherworlds of an America that contains equal parts dream and nightmare, Swedish author/photographer Carl Abrahamsson captures a dissolved civilization in stark images: architecture, professionals, homeless, sign languages from bygone days, competition at any cost, saturated emotions, and harsh patterns of a perhaps not so manifest destiny. Working in a tradition of timeless humanist reportage approaches (as formulated by pioneers such as Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Robert Frank), Abrahamsson’s photographic images display the world as it was right there and then, and also leave a retinal residue that (hopefully) still keeps us thinking today.
“Carl’s photographs capture the pathos of America’s crumbling artifice, casting an impartial outsider’s eye on our failed dreams and delusions. Now, as we tumble helplessly into our Trumpian dystopia, these images will perhaps serve as nostalgic icons of a disintegrating paradise, soon to be gone forever.” – Michael Gira
“It’s like when I found my next door neighbor’s photographs of my own house that he had been secretly taking.” – Joe Coleman
“Welcome to the unedited, unfiltered and unveiled world of the promised land. More Americans… Images that tell stories within a story through an eye of awareness and honesty.” – Carl Michael von Hausswolff
”Abrahamsson views the American landscape from a cultural distance, finding unexpected moments of grace in street corners and forgotten spaces. His black and white photographs cut through pretense to capture an America that exists in the space between glitter and rust, hope and hopelessness, lives unfolding in the shadow of fading dreams.” – Sean Bonner
Trapart Books, 2025. 172 pages, hardbound. Available HERE (and at all their national/local sites).
