Low-key places and people caught in the moment they are oblivious to the world and fulfilled by their inner lives.
It may be seconds, but that's what makes a photographer a photographer. To see life, capture it and tell it through a picture. But Gunnar Smoliansky was really the opposite of a snap-shot photographer.
Although, for example, his marvelous images of children playing on streets and backyards at Södermalm in Stockholm in the 1950s capture gestures, body language and looks, there is a continuous stillness in his six decades of photographic life. Both in the images of people but also all Gunnar's images of places, nature and human traces. Silence and an unmatched gray scale.
Gunnar Smoliansky was one of Sweden's foremost photographic craftsmen. A day outside the darkroom was perhaps not a completely lost day, but close. At some point, he compared his artistry with that of the shoemaker. Same feeling for material, surface, texture and quality. Both color pictures and the digital were completely foreign and unattractive to Gunnar. "The color is just in the way," he said.
To characterize himself, Gunnar Smoliansky borrowed poet Vladimir Majakovsky's metaphor for his poem-self "A cloud in pants". As invisible as obvious. He has also been called Sweden's most shy photographer and once described how he often waits for a place to become completely empty before taking a picture. "So that people don't have to wonder what kind of fool it is that plaques right down the street."
When Gunnar Smoliansky was still photographing people, he did not talk to them before taking the picture. "I'm just interested in what it was like before I was there," he said. Now it is afterwards. Fortunately, all books and pictures are left by one of Sweden's finest and least elusive photographers.