Abraham Engelmark

Words by Austin Maloney

Taking place in August, Way Out West festival comes to Gothenburg at the point in the year when it’s at its most scenic, with the late summer sun painting the coastal city’s buildings with a warm, deep glow. It’s a photographer’s dream, where, if you can forget the work involved, you might even think the shots choose you. And it was the setting for one of Abraham Engelmark’s most memorable photographs a couple of years ago. He and a close friend had both been working at the festival – he, naturally, as a photographer, she, an author and public speaker, giving a talk at one of the festival’s discussion stages. When they both found some free time, they took a break from the noise and chaos of the festival grounds and hung out for a while back in the city. When it was time to go back, they set off on their way, when suddenly a lightbulb went off in Engelmark’s head, and something about the setting caused his photographer’s instincts to kick in. They took a couple of photos, and they turned out so well that his friend still uses them as press photos to this day, ahead of other shots taken with higher budgets and much, much more planning involved. Sometimes things just fall into place like that – and if you’re prepared, you can take a great photograph. That’s why, despite his wife teasing him about it (“she says sometimes, ‘you can take mental pictures as well, you know, you don’t need to bring the camera everywhere!’”, he laughs), he usually has a camera on him all the time. You never know what the world will send your way, and you have to always be ready to capture the stories that find you.

Telling stories is what drives Engelmark as a photographer. Hailing from Uppsala, a university town about an hour north of Stockholm, photography didn’t seem an obvious future when he was growing up. “I was brought up in a family where you could be anything you wanted”, he says, “doctor or engineer [laughs]”. But like a lot of Swedish kids, music was an obvious draw, and playing around in bands brought him into the creative world. It was graffiti however, that saw him first pick up a camera. “One of my best friends was into graffiti”, says Abraham, “and so I also wanted to be into graffiti. I wasn’t as good as he was, but I had an idea. I took my dad’s digital camera, it was an old HP thing, I think with a memory of about 100 photos. And I took photos of the tags that I made, and other graffiti stuff. So even though I was bad at graffiti, I could take a cool photo of it and make it seem like I was good [laughs]”. He was making music in the MySpace era, and the communication potential opened up by that website and the other emerging social networks really drew him in, even if he wasn’t really consciously aware of it at the time: “All that stuff was blowing up, and you needed photos of your band. We couldn’t afford to hire a photographer, so I had to take the photos myself. You could have different photos for every song you put out. And then if you take a photo of your band, a big part of branding and communicating your vibe is through that photo. I’ve always been into communication, and photos are a very efficient way of communicating. You can get the message and feeling from something very easily, just from a photo. I don’t think I thought of it like that [at that time], but I guess it was something that came intuitively”.

Those experiments marked his first steps into photography, but there was still a winding path to walk before he established it as a career. He initially studied at Stockholm’s Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, but became so unhappy that he dropped out. He made ends meet for a while by working as a sound engineer at gigs and clubs, but then developed tinnitus. So he launched into something new. He started a degree in communications, and fell back on his interest in photography and started to explore what he could do. “I borrowed a camera from a friend, for a few small gigs that I tricked people into giving me, by pretending I could do photography. Then things just took off. I got my first paid photography job in August 2014. It was a wedding, and it paid $120 dollars, and the client thought that was expensive [laughs]. Then I studied for two more years, then got a job at a production company doing live streams and did photography on the side, and then from 2016 it became my main job”.

When Engelmark finally took up photography full-time, it became clear that he had found his calling. He has a CV that blends commercial work for some of Sweden’s biggest companies (H&M, Klarna, Volvo), with more straightforward work like weddings and live photography, and personal projects like his portraits, where the photos seem to go beyond mere images of the person, and reach out to the viewer and carry something of a sense of their lives. Engelmark sees the ability to make a connection with his subjects as a vital part of his job, whether he’s photographing an old friend or a high-speed job where he’ll barely share a room with the person for more than ten minutes. It’s not just about generating content for him – he sees his work as another field of storytelling, and for that to be possible, you need to find a way to connect with your subject, no matter what the time, place and circumstance. It’s a key part of a photographer’s skillset: “You become almost an amateur psychologist. You have to try and find common ground, very quickly”, he says. “Usually, the best way of doing it is for me to be the most embarrassing person in the room [laughs]. But sometimes that can also have the opposite effect. You need to be able to read it. Sometimes you have to know when not to tell a joke. Sometimes you’re shooting people who aren’t used to being in front of a camera. But with famous people, and big shot CEOs, they are so used to the camera that you need to flip things around a bit. But without showing your intentions too much. Because if I say I want a candid portrait, they will act candid. And there’s a big difference between acting candid and being candid. It’s about the dynamic. Most of the time when I shoot press photos or whatever, I invite people to my studio. and it takes time for them to feel at home there. So it helps if I can figure out what kind of music they like, and have it on in the background. You need to use any trick you can. Because in a portrait, 90% of what makes the photo is the atmosphere in the room”.

Given the luxury of time, he prefers to spend a day with his subjects, and to use that time to figure out what makes them tick, and what kind of photo, taken when, will be the one that illuminates their character. “One of my favourite types of sessions is when I have an entire afternoon with someone. We have a session in the studio, then maybe go take a coffee, talk about life, and take some photos there. And then after all that, you go back to the studio, and that’s usually when you get the real version of someone. That’s really fun”. But you don’t need half a day in a café to get that effect. “I was recently on the set with a big Swedish artist, who was shooting a commercial, and I was just the behind-the-scenes photographer. And that’s when you get the really nice moments. Sometimes get a couple of seconds with the artist, as they try and reset, take their mask off. And then you have your moment - after that, the director calls them back, the mask goes back on and the moment is gone. And so you want to capture that, but also when they’re in action, and tell the entire story of it. But you also need to respect the integrity of the person, and choose when to raise your camera”.

The story is always what drives him, and it’s something he becomes animated about when we start talking about craft and gear. Engelmark is a recovering gearhead (“when I started out, I brought so much gear. I think I bought a new piece of gear for every shoot”), but after a photographer he respected told him that he worked with only one camera and one lens, he simplified his set up. Now he walks the line – he uses the gear he needs to make good work, but also enjoys the challenge and creativity that working with less brings: “When you have all that stuff, you get caught up in it, and you might lose sight of what you’re doing. When you want to be creative, it’s very good to be limited”. But he’s evangelical about the fact that gear, or even technique, isn’t the important thing when it comes to producing a good photo – it’s having something in mind you want to communicate, and to be able to communicate that effectively. “Everything comes down to the purpose of the photo. There are a lot of photographers coming up now, in the past few years, who you can see aren’t very skilled. But when you look at their photos, they still tell a story”, he says. “You can use whatever gear you want, but the thing is – what story is it telling? Sometimes you can tell a story just by choosing the equipment. My most candid photos and my favourite photos of my daughter are shot using my iPhone. If I shot the same frames with a professional camera, it would take away the candidness. It would look too good. It being shot on an iPhone shows that it is a real moment. Because for that photo of her at the playground, she’s not there to be portrayed, she’s there to have fun with her dad. All these things contribute to the story”.

Outside of just technique and equipment however, knowing what you’re doing is vitally important to a photographer, and especially when establishing your own style and character. And a part of that is knowing the cultural and historic context you work in, and how that context adds layers to what your photo says. “You need to be very aware of these things”, he says. “A lot of photography today is very sexist, especially in the portrayal of musicians. And I think it comes down to culture, it’s built into the culture”. He gives an example of how context can dictate an image. “You never see an old portrait, an oil painting of a king or whatever, where he looks up towards you. They’re always sitting on a horse or holding a sword and looking down on you”. So with his portraiture, when Abraham works with women, he’ll often shoot them from below, to project power and strength, rather than from above, which traditionally is a more docile, submissive pose. “Recently I shot a friend of mine, who is a CEO of a big company. She has to deal with a lot of egos, and so if I take a photo that makes her look docile, that’s not who she is. Because she’s got the job she has because of who she is and the strength she has. These are things I try to be very aware of when I shoot. It’s very interesting, because women usually are shorter. A female CEO might always be the shortest one in the room. So to portray her in a situation where she looks down on the viewer can be very empowering”.

One of the privileges of Abraham’s work is that he gets to travel, and has gotten to see a lot of the world through his lens. Some experiences stand out, like a trip to Rwanda working with WaterAid, which really made a mark on him. “I can’t even describe how different their world is to mine”, he says. “Kids there need to walk for two or three hours to get water. It was very humbling. You need to show respect, and go there with the right mindset - and not act as a white saviour. But it’s such a beautiful landscape, and the people were some of the happiest I’ve ever met. I would definitely love to go back, and do more work like that”. But in terms of travelling, he’s curious about almost everything. “I would like to do a round-the-world trip!”, he laughs. “I would love to shoot in very remote places. My brother-in-law is a hunter, and he dreams of going to Alaska. I would love to join him to document that. I would like to go to Russia, somewhere remote in Russia, and document people there. But I would also like to sit in a studio in Hollywood with a famous artist and shoot them. But in terms of big experiences, I have one long-term dream - that the next time a big magazine has eight minutes with a world leader, that I’ll get the call to do the photos”.

As you might imagine from someone driven to capture the world around him, Engelmark has a big archive – tucked away in digital storage, he has every photo he’s ever taken since he first started messing about with his dad’s HP back in 2005. Partially that’s just for his own pleasure – he counts himself a nostalgic person (“Once a week, I go back into my archive, and I just find the ugliest photos I can find, and send them to the people in the photos. Like ‘remember this?’”). But it also helps keep him motivated – he can see his development over the years, and see how far he’s come. “For me, I don’t develop in a linear manner”, he says. “I develop in a staircase pattern, I make breakthroughs.  So one of my biggest breakthroughs was when I bought my first Leica. It opened up a new world - It was the perfect camera for me. But when I got it, the files looked different to me. Because they were different to how my old camera worked. I had to work it out. Getting new gear like that can be inspiring, as it makes you have to push yourself out of your comfort zone to get the best out of it. I remember that back then in 2017, my skillset grew a lot. That was also the year I got my first assignment abroad, so that was a big thing for me. But then after that, I just leaned on that new knowledge for two years. It’s not linear. It’s about breakthroughs. So now I feel like I’ve been at the same level for a while, so I’m working on how to make my next breakthrough. And [looking back on the archive], it’s comforting to know that if I just keep at it, someday I will make the next one. Someday the lightbulb will turn on again, and I’ll make the next breakthrough. I want to do new things. And even do things I haven’t done in a while, and see how I would do them now. It’s how you open new doors''. And there are still plenty of stories out there waiting to be told.