polaroid 600 | laurentdenimal

The photo book Djurgården, in the King's park was released in 2014, and it's my second book documenting my work as a gardener.

Djurgården is now the world’s first national city park. It forms a green oasis just across the water from the city centre, and is the former royal deer park in Stockholm

In 2009 I was employed by the park management as a gardener on Djurgården. From early in spring until late autumn I spent my days on Djurgården with a Polaroid 600 camera in my pocket.

Polaroid photography provides unique, smallformat images without a negative, limited to a single original photograph.The motif disappears at the very instant that it is caught, and the effect is immediate.

My photographs portray everyday life on Djurgården from the perspective of a gardener. The camera is always ready to capture the moment: people enjoying a walk in the woods, monuments and museums, the open water and impenetrable bushes.

Twelve photographs from the book

From the foreword, by Per Wästberg

"One day in May 1682, King Karl XI of Sweden noted in his diary: “I rode out to Djurgården in the morning and could hear the deer calling.” The striking thing is that we can still ride out to Djurgården and listen to the roe deer grazing there. We can see flocks of mergansers landing on the water at Ryssviken in February, or watch the dawn breaking over the island of Skeppsholmen and the southern regions of the park. On Sunday evenings the boats coming in from the archipelago send puffs of smoke into the air around the toylike tower on Kastellholmen while their wake breaks on the rocks and quays and the brightly coloured crab apples shine out among the dark leaves of the trees. (...)

Denimal has roamed the grassed expanses of southern Djurgården in his own fashion, stooping to observe the first spring blooms, absorbing the changing seasons, just touching upon the tourist clichés, occasionally including a face or capturing an unexpected detail. He prefers his immediate surroundings rather than the generalized view. This is Laurent Denimal’s personal view of Djurgården and that is how it should be: Each of us surely has his or her recollections of Stockholm and of what is, perhaps, Europe’s most beautiful park. And this view is constantly altered to accord with new discoveries and the vagaries of time. . (...)"

The foreword is written by the Swedish author and member of the Swedish Academy Per Wästberg and the presentation by Laurent Denimal (texts in Swedish, French, English and German).

It is designed by Johannes Molin and edited by Carlsson Bokförlag in Stockholm.

Tommy Arvidson wrote about the book on his blog, "Om fotoboken".