This is the first photograph that made me realize that photography is an art and not just about taking pictures at holidays.

 

When I was six years old our family took a trip to the south of Sweden. We stayed at a hostel in Haväng by the sea. On the short walk to the beach you walk over this field with a single tree on it. Every day my dad was talking about having to take a picture of this tree. In many ways my dad is a kind of Zen master of simplicity – he can eat the simplest foods, take a hot bath or watch a sunset – and that is all he needs. He never got caught up in the kind of ambitious struggles that a lot of us do, he says the art of life is in how you live it – not what you become. I can still see him hunched over his Ikoflex making this unbeatable masterpiece. So for all the years to come – in the midst of our family album of drunken relatives, awkward confirmation poses, the odd austronaut and Christmas trips to aunt Jenny – there was this one perfect image of a lonely tree. 

I think on some level he made a self portrait.

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