Poste Restante

The Eyes Publishing, 2016. First edition.
Clothbound hardcover with dust jacket, 210 x 250 mm, 124 pp. , b/w illustrated throughout. Photographs by Christer Stromholm. Text by Tor-Ivon Odulf (French).

Christer Strömholm, born in 1918 in Sweden, began is photographic career in earnest in1958, traveling to places like Paris, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Calcutta, and Nairobi. He is most known for his intimate black-and-white street photography portrait series.

This new facsmilie edition of Poste Restante comprises the original photographs, layout, and texts, including the unrevised introduction from 1967, a text based on a taped interview with Strömholm conducted over five days at a hotel in Paris. Titled “Before the Photographs”, in it he recounts childhood memories and various of his experiences during World War II.

Poste Restante has become one of the most collectible photography books from the mid-twentieth century, ranking alongside the better-known publications of Robert Frank and Ed van der Elsken. This photographic autobiography details Strömholm’s extensive travels across the globe in a book constructed as an Existentialist diary. Juxtaposing the urbane and the macabre, combining portraiture and street scenes with abstract photographic fragments, the book uses metaphor and visual pun in an unrelenting stream of consciousness. In its sequence and design, it is a book that prefigures much of contemporary photographic publishing and art practice.