JH Engström is a renowned Swedish photographer and film-maker whose work blurs the lines between documentary and personal expression. From his early explorations of homelessness and existential questions in the seminal "Shelter" project, his work has been published in countless books and exhibited widely. Engström's photography has been characterized by a raw, confrontational intimacy.

Eschewing traditional photographic techniques in favour of more immersive, collaborative approaches, Engström developed a distinctive visual style that privileges direct human connection over detached observation. His photographs radiate a powerful, uncompromising presence, reflecting the artist's own restless search for meaning and self-understanding.

Throughout his career, Engström has remained fiercely independent, resisting the trappings of the art world in favour of a deeply personal, intuitive creative process. We caught up with JH at his Paris based studio to discuss his formative years and early work; keep your eyes peeled for a video follow up later this year. 

“My father set up a rudimentary darkroom in the cellar to make a few prints, as many people did in the ‘70s, and that process became something I was attracted to, I found it exciting. I began photographing in my teenage years as something completely separate from my friends or any social context, it wasn’t something secret but, with hindsight I was searching for a language to express myself. This feeling began after moving to Paris for around two years at ten years of age, speaking no French at all, I lost my ability to communicate with language effectively.”

"I became a member of a photography club in my small Swedish town and I remember showing things I had shot to the old lads, who would photograph their wives or elks, flowers, things like that on slide film. I think they thought I was weird, but they were very supportive of my experimentation. I would ride my 30kph moped there and experiment for hours and hours, with double exposing, weird printing experiments.”

“To create is so lustful, the idea of ‘creating’ something is so appealing to me and has been since I was a kid, even before picking up a camera. I painted a lot, constructed things and so I think that’s why this idea of experimenting with the format, in the darkroom came so naturally to me. I started shooting with a Nikon FM2, learning the basic principles from a book I borrowed, like opening and closing the aperture to let in more or less light. It wasn’t complicated, because once you understand a few things, you get it.”

“I was confronted with photography books in my teenage years in the school library. There weren’t many of them, but it was probably what began my continuing belief in books, because there I was in the middle of the Swedish countryside in front of this small shelf of books, giving me the experience of art without having to be in Paris, London, New York or Tokyo in some fancy gallery. That’s what I love about books, you don’t have to know anything about art or photography, but if you can get hold of one, you can look in it and get something from it. You don’t have to go to these exclusive places, or even know about them to look at work.”

“I was not only influenced by the work of Anders Petersen, but I worked with him too. What I learned was that an important parameter in his work was time. Time is a constraint you cannot cheat. For Anders, spending time with his projects and subjects would allow things to develop in a number of ways; developing personal relationships, how you are seeing the work yourself as you live with it over time and maybe even eventually understand what you’re trying to communicate more intricately. This experience lead me to making the series ‘Shelter’ about homeless women in a shelter in Stockholm.”

“There are two reasons I made this work, one is a kind of Naive anger around how these women were treated in society, in the streets, being looked down upon. I wanted to draw awareness to this, to highlight and provoke discussion around this topic. The other reason is much more egoistic, a curiosity around what it means existentially to be in that situation, to have nothing; what that does to a human being. In a sense, my second book 'Trying to Dance' continues the work of 'Shelter' in that it approaches the notion or question of the fact that we always have to relate to the strong human presence of the person in front of us.”

“I spent three and a half years with these people in the same shelter, day-in day-out, and it’s very true that living with the work, over time your relationship with it changes. After one and a half years of shooting 35mm on the Nikon FM, I realised the imagery didn’t work. It looked the same as work done by others like this, so I decided to change. From one day to the next, I put away every negative from those first 1.5 years. This was not an easy decision to make, but I had remembered a professor telling me that if you want to do work that feels true to yourself, you have to make difficult decisions sometimes.”

“This was a difficult lesson to go through, working like hell for over a year, but it’s important to say no to the work, if it doesn’t feel right. I then started shooting with a large format camera, which was a completely different method, a different process. How you approach each picture is fundamentally different because you cannot steal a quick picture with 4x5. There has to be an agreement, you have to work together, so that changed it a lot. I also realised that I cannot describe their lives, I’m not homeless, I’m not a woman; I could only describe my encounter with them.”

“If I had to give advice, I’d say that you have to figure out why you are communicating certain things, what is it about for you, or what is your reason to do this; I say this without having the answer, of course. It sounds like an enormous cliche to say, but I think it comes down to being as authentic to yourself as you can be. If you don’t, you will always make art that looks like someone else's, you have to do what you need to express. I cannot come up with a stronger concept for my work than having an urge to express myself. That is my concept.”

“I’ve never been a camera fetishist, but there are certainly cameras that I function better with. I just need a camera to work together with me, rather than against me. Large format cameras sometimes work against me [laughs] and that’s a good thing, I have to make an effort. On the other end of the scale, compact cameras are also great because you can bring them anywhere in a pocket. I’ve somehow become known as a ‘snapshot’ photographer but many of my books are shot on large format. The first two books, 'Shelter and ‘Trying to Dance’ are entirely large format, the whole fucking book [laughs]”

“There has always been an aura around large format, that it must be precise and used preciously by nature of the fact that you shoot one image at a time; every image asks for your investment. You have to load the cassette, you put it in, you take the darkslide out and shoot. I made a conscious decision to use it less respectfully, I said fuck the rules of large format and use it in a way that felt more intuitive to me.”

www.jhengstrom.org / @jhengstromwork

Portraits by Jonnie Craig shot using Leica R8 / 35mm f2 Summicron R / 80mm f1.4 Summilux and Kodak Portra 400