Vibey Stockholm

There’s a pretty basic set of things that makes city streets attractive to me as a photographer. Good light. People out and about. Interesting old and new architecture. Stockholm has lots of all that. Which is great, even though I didn’t go there there to take pictures. Well, not specifically to take pictures.

The company that employs me is Swedish and its global headquarters is in Stockholm. I had cause to spend a week there in September, and managed to fix it so that I flew in on a Saturday night. This was so I could spend Sunday in the streets with my camera, an opportunistic means of getting past the jet lag and getting my head right before four straight days of meetings. The black and white photos in this set—shot on Kodak Tri-X 400, naturally—are the result of that Sunday’s solo walking tour of the city.

There’s a business hotel right nextdoor to company HQ, but keen to explore the city as much as possible, and knowing that I’d want some fresh air and the opportunity to stretch my legs before and after long days spent in conference rooms, I booked a hotel that’s a good 20 minute walk away. The color photos in this set came throughout the week as I walked that commute. The shooting wasn’t plentiful, but I managed to get through a roll of Ilfocolor Vintage Tone 400 in the early mornings and late afternoons. 

I picked up that Ilfoclor VT roll as an experiment, at a dusty vintage camera shop in Gamla Stan, old town Stockholm. Galma Stan was established about 750 years ago and the camera shop looked like it’d been there most of that time. It’s the kind of small store that’s dark inside despite having large corner windows because every inch of window display and wallspace inside is jammed with old European cameras of every random make and model in various states of repair. And disrepair.

I’d never seen that particular film stock before, it was cheap (I’ve since learned that it is not cheap in the US...then again, what is anymore?), and I must have been caught up in the vintage vibes of the whole scene, so I thought what the hell. And now that I’ve got the results from my admittedly very limited one-roll test, I’ve decided that I really dislike it. The contrast is heavy handed, the saturation is weird and oddly intense with reds and blues only—everything else pretty desaturated—the grain is coarse in a way I don’t like, and the character of the “vintage” tone feels…flat. Turns out it’s not even a proper Ilford film, but a repackaged bargain German film called ORWO Wolfen NC500 in an Ilford off-brand canister. Reminder to self: beware of hipster film stocks. 

The half dozen photos I salvaged from the Ilfocolor roll and the dozen keepers of Kodak Tri-X 400 make up a collection of images that I think nicely conveys the vibe of the Nordic city on the cusp of Autumn.

All the photos in this set were made with a Leica MP and an Elmarit-M 28mm f/2.8 lens. Underdog Film Lab in West Oakland processed the Ilfocolor, I developed the Tri-X, and scanned the negatives 0f both stocks, at home.