A Minor Wrong Doing
Henrik Malmström
A Minor Wrong Doing
Photographs: Henrik Malmström
Publisher: Kominek Books
288 pages
Year: 2015
Comments: Softcover with embossing and silver ink on black paper, 210 x 163 mm. Black & white photographs. Design and editing by Henrik Malmström and Misha Kominek. Limited edition of 375 copies. New.
Slowly but steadily we become immersed in what Henrik Malmström saw and photographed from the window of his living room. The pages of A Minor Wrong doing unfold as a hypnotic sequence of candid shots taken at the neighbourhood of St. Georg in Hamburg, between 2011 and 2014. Hundreds of them, they record the last remains of street life in an urban area that is currently undergoing fierce gentrification after recent official law enforcement against street-based prostitution. Malmström used a cheap digital camera forcing its ISO levels to reproduce in each scene the raw effect of a surveillance cam. The grainy monochromatic material of his voyeuristic enterprise has been put together in this voluminous book replicating a messy police report archive. Printed in sharp dots, the grain adds a grade of unprecedented abstraction and beauty to the sequence whereas the quantity of images breaks with the conventional linear story structure. There is an uncanny feel in it. And obsession : the unconfessed obsession of a photographer who happened to be in the right place at the right time. We do not get to see much of what he photographed but we can still imagine pretty much happening in this obscure underworld of transactions.
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