Sketch of Paris

"I was ten years old in 1979 when I moved with my parents from the countryside of Värmland County, Sweden, to Paris. It was my first time in a major international city.

We returned to Värmland two years later. But ever since then Paris has been a second home, and I have visited and lived there off and on. 

These photographs were made between 1991 and 2012."

JH Engström, Paris, 2013.

For over twenty years, Swedish photographer JH Engström has lived and worked in Paris, a city that, like New York, has a long photographic pedigree; countless photographers have been inspired by its iconic architecture and busy streets. Sketch of Paris, however, is hardly a catalog of classic Parisian scenes, offering instead a raw yet lyrical portrayal of the artist’s misadventures, loves, and random encounters in its streets, bars, and artist lofts—an entirely personal Paris. Engström brings us on a gritty, no-holds-barred guided tour of life in his adopted city. The photographs provide a type of homage to Paris, a city that has greatly influenced and inspired Engström—as a photographer and as a person. Beautifully produced in a slipcased volume, the book brings together 250 color and black-and-white photographs all made between 1991 and 2012, tracing a critical time during the development of the artist’s own voice and vision.