Metropolia

Wandering in an imaginary city, Metropolonia invites the reader to a dreamlike wandering punctuated by enigmatic encounters.

The urban space is apprehended in fragments, guessing at the silhouettes we meet there. Mists, exploded grains, lights sometimes saturated, shades of gray, monochrome colors playing with cold blues or warm oranges, with Bogren the visual experience becomes sensitive. Where are we? In a city populated by solitary presences, immersed in a city with facades that resemble walls: it is a question of seeing beyond appearances, of going to the other side of the mirror, of losing our footing to see better.

Each image is a vision, captured while it seems to dissolve before our eyes: we distinguish passages, architectures, the corridors of a subway station, in the distance an island bristling with buildings. The wandering is also made of encounters, of characters seized on the spot, like apparitions, sometimes with closed eyes, locked in their inner world, often caught in close-up. 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 slips away but that the art of the photographer has been able to seize in extremis, by stealth. Life is a dream and all reality is an illusion, to quote Pedro Calderon, and diving into unreality remains a pleasure.