Wandering in an imaginary city, Metropolia invites the viewer on a dreamlike stroll punctuated by enigmatic encounters. The urban space is apprehended in fragments, guessed over the silhouettes that we cross there. Mists, exploded grains, sometimes saturated lights, shades of grey, monochrome colors playing with cold blues or warm oranges, with Bogren the visual experience becomes sensitive. He brings in color photographs for the first time, which punctuate the B&W: The use of color was a way to rebel against myself, as the photographer explains in the interview of the book, to see if I could do something totally new. With black-and-white, I started to know a little too much about what I was doing, while color was like a foreign language that I learned slowly. But to tell you the truth, my color images are very monochromatic.

Capturing intimacy, expressing the fragile, showing the impermanence of things: Martin Bogren’s visual universe reveals the illusion of the world. His images capture on their surface a reality that dissolves but that the art of the photographer has been able to capture in extremis, by stealth. -Publisher