When I was young, I loved cars. I had a Ford Prefect, one of the worst vehicles ever made, which was a somewhat larger version of the Ford Anglia, also just as bad. The Prefect was a four-door and I’d bought it one day when I’d managed to scrape together eighty kronor. It didn’t last long. It wasn’t Mr. Frost’s fault. This homeless guy had chosen to sleep in its backseat one chilly night. This car was so tall and narrow it had gotten the nickname “Hot Dog Stand.” The reason Mr. Frost (yes, that was really his name) could sleep there at all was because he was constantly exhausted. Whenever I’d go on an errand, he would be there in the backseat.
We didn’t talk much. I’d try to give him food, sandwiches, but he’d refuse them. He would just vomit up all real food. His alcoholism was so far advanced that the only calories he got were from sweet strong wine. He found it himself. I did not want to go to the State Liquor Store and get it for him. I looked young, so I had trouble buying alcohol. The cashiers mistakenly believed I was just sixteen with a fake driver’s license. I was, in fact, ten years older. Anyway. Once I was driving up the Western Bridge heading south when Mr. Frost got scared and started screaming. Smoke had begun to fill the inside of the vehicle, and I quickly opened the retractable front windshield, a feature not found on later models. (This one was from 1953.) Air streamed in but it made no difference. Cutting off the engine while still going up the bridge would be a mistake, I thought, but as soon as we crested the top, I let the car roll down to the Långholmen exit. Thanks to the fact that we still drove on the left in those days, I was able to pull off immediately and I parked the still smoking car on a piece of lawn. (Right-hand traffic was introduced three years later, even though a large majority of the Swedish population had voted against it.) When I opened the hood, I saw that a bit of rusty metal had fallen on the battery and shorted it out.
I abandoned the car where it was, and Mr. Frost and I hoofed it, somewhat unsteadily, through the city (images of destruction beneath white powdered snow) back to Drottninggatan 37. I let him in, and he disappeared immediately into the office of the former shoe store. Afterward, I stopped locking the front door. I was never sure how many individuals this saved from freezing to death on the streets; at least they could have a roof over their heads.
In the forties, Arne Wahlberg started getting migraines whenever he had to focus his camera. When I found that out, I began to call it the Wahlberg Disease. There was just one way to focus a camera in those days: you had to slowly turn the lens. On larger cameras, you’d expand or contract the bellows using a rack-and-pinion system until the image appeared in focus on the ground-glass screen.
As a photographer myself, with the same tendency to get migraines, this wasn’t surprising. Straining the eye to focus the camera could set them off. You never get used to migraines. My siblings had them and so did my mother. Still, you got used to one thing: the nervous anticipation that, all of a sudden, it could go bang inside your brain. So I felt fine with the idea that the man who’d been here before me had suffered from the same illness. In the end, Wahlberg’s migraines forced him to give up photography. I hoped I would not be stricken by the same fate.
I slept so uneasily on Drottninggatan, I would wake to make nightly rounds. I soon became familiar with each and every corner of the building so that darkness was never a problem. The shoe store and its offices on the ground floor. The import firm on the second floor. The former lawyer’s offices on the third floor. The strange firm on the fourth floor — I never figured out what it had been. And “mine” on the sixth floor. All of it a labyrinth. Each room had its own smell.
Everywhere, except on my floor, were sleeping men. The rumor of an unlocked building spread and so the number of homeless men was growing. Bundles of men wrapped in blankets and rags. Some of them talked nervously in their sleep. Others seemed to plunge straight into unconsciousness. Mr. Frost was one of the latter. I felt I was being a good person. By leaving the front door unlocked, these individuals were saved from sleeping outdoors. One night, I even counted them: there were thirty-seven.
My own living arrangements were a bit marginal for some time. I had moved from one temporary address to another. It’s funny how memory can trip you up when it comes to years gone by. I remember 1964 to 1967 as three years of loneliness, filled with paranoia and masturbation. But if I check the facts, I was actually married during those years — in fact, I got married twice. And I remember relationships on the side as well. I remember one woman, also married, who would sneak off from her job as an office manager to meet me at number 37. Perhaps you’re wondering why I wasn’t living with my wife if I was, indeed, married. But I couldn’t live with her, even though we were friends, because she, too, was homeless. In those days she was living temporarily at the apartment of a writer on Västerlånggatan in Old Town.
By the age of twenty-six, I was riding a career roller coaster. I was part of the cultural life of the capital city. The marriage, if you’re still wondering about that, was not exactly burning brightly. Although we weren’t living together, my wife and I, we’d get together for work. She was in the theater and was an excellent fashion model. The fashion house Mah-Jong bought our photographs. We hadn’t gotten around to getting a divorce, because in the late sixties people didn’t bother with empty conventions like that.
I had built a somewhat precarious living as a photographer by visiting the editorial offices of all the magazines in Stockholm, showing them my photos. And on those occasions, I would make an effort to seem like a congenial coworker. Some editors gave me small assignments; they would test me and then try someone else. In those days, everyday transactions were done on a cash basis. Whenever I’d been given a job and delivered my pictures, I’d go to the cashier and pick up an envelope with bills. I usually thought the amount was too small. My ability to use a camera was greater than my ability to fit in with the job and its jargon.
This jargon had no words for the ideas I turned over in my mind — for example, the words to seriously define the problems with/of photography. The most important of these was the one most often ignored: the psychic energy needed for each photograph. They say when photography was invented, around 1840, many people refused to be photographed as they believed the camera would steal their living souls and leave them as empty shells. In a way, that is true. But it’s not the subject who becomes an empty shell, it’s the photographer. Every exposure demands concentration. I did not use a flash (my technique was based on natural light and the steadiness of the tripod), but the inside of my own head flashed each time I hit the cable release. Migraines lie in wait for every photographer.
Another issue in photography: the subject is flattened and always smaller than reality. Larger prints don’t help; the real landscape or cityscape is at all times larger than the print.
Theoretically, a portrait could be different. August Strindberg, when he contemplated opening a portrait studio in Berlin, had the theory that the human soul could be captured only if the negative was the same size as the subject’s face. He had written a short story he would read while the picture was being taken. The person sitting for the photograph had to remain perfectly still while the photographer (in this case, also the writer) would remove the cap from the lens and then put it back on it after the last line was read. The story, therefore, became a timer replacing the mechanical one. The story lasted twenty-five seconds. Strindberg’s homemade lens was as slow as the glass plates of the 1880s. The negative format was probably 24 x 36 cm and the glass plates had to be specially made. Not impossible, this required painting light-sensitive emulsion onto glass plates in a darkroom. On the other hand, he could never get his homemade camera — with a simple lens from a kerosene lamp — to work. You can have many plans — but not all of them will be realized. Just ask me.