In December 2019, Gunnar Smoliansky’s footsteps fell silent on the streets of Stockholm. His photographic career began in the 1950s, and ever since, his wanderings through the city have resulted in countless minimalist snapshots of Stockholm and its inhabitants.

Over time, many of his photographs have become iconic historical documents, capturing architecture and urban life that differ fundamentally from those of today, despite only a few decades separating them. A fine example is the photograph featured in this auction, taken at Slussen in 1952. It depicts a functionalist structure that was both loved and hated, and which, with the much-discussed new Golden Bridge, has now disappeared forever. The photograph also offers a glimpse of the people crossing Söderström. The dramatic compositions, with their striking contrasts between daylight and the darkness of the tiled tunnels, reveal Smoliansky’s keen photographic eye. One can also sense an admiration for Henri Cartier-Bresson and André Kertész, two world-renowned photographers whose primary subject was street life. Wherever Smoliansky went, he brought this same perceptive gaze to his surroundings.

The twenty-four photographs of Slussen were taken when the photographer was nineteen years old, as he made his way home from his job as a night watchman at Stadsgårdskajen, hence the beautiful morning light. His photographs carve out a unique visual iconography of Stockholm as a metropolis.

In 1987, Carl-Johan Malmberg reflected on Smoliansky’s Slussen photographs when they were exhibited at the Lido cinema in Stockholm:

“Exemplary: if there were a centre to Gunnar Smoliansky’s visual world, it might be Slussen in Stockholm, with its stairways, bridges, railings, railway tracks and streets. A little girl urinating in a courtyard on Söder, a tram in São Paulo, a pine forest in Hälsingland are random points on the concentric circles radiating from there. Time, too, is concentric: photographs from the early 1950s — the boys’ hairstyles and caps, a chip basket — seem strangely contemporary. No veil of elapsed time remains between us and them. Perhaps, for Gunnar Smoliansky, reality consists of a series of intimately interconnected spaces, small points of light within time.”