ArtistSwedish
Per Forsell
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Per Edvin Forsell was born on 28 February 1898 in Vaxbo, a small settlement in Bollnas municipality in the province of Halsingland, central Sweden. He died on 5 July 1979 in Mo parish, Söderhamns municipality. He came from a poor crofter family and spent his early years helping his father in the timber forest. He later moved to Harjedalen, working as a timber cutter and log driver, before settling in Ljusne from 1922 to 1950, where he carried planks at the local sawmill.
Forsell bought his first camera in 1931 for 125 kronor - a modest sum that nonetheless represented a significant investment for a sawmill worker. By 1935 he had entered his first photography competition, submitting winter photographs to the Halsingland and Gastrikland sections of the Swedish Tourist Association. The response was encouraging. In 1944 he won first prize in the major master competition run by the magazine Foto with three works: 'Fia pa Knappåsen', 'Byfogden', and 'Karin' - the last of these a nude study later known as 'Karin i vassen'. The jury described the photograph as 'a sculpturally chiseled nude characterized by a rare freshness and naturalness.' The image sold at Bukowskis in Stockholm in 2017 for just over 14,000 kronor, a record for Forsell at auction.
For close to fifty years, Forsell travelled the Swedish countryside photographing elderly men and women: people with furrowed faces, white hair, and bodies shaped by decades of physical labour and rural poverty. His portraits are not sentimental. They hold the sitter steadily in frame and allow the weight of a life to surface through posture, expression, and light. This sustained documentary project earned him a place in the collection of Moderna Museet in Stockholm, which holds over 150 of his photographs, as well as recognition from the Photographic Society of America, of which he became a member in 1960.
Between 1948 and 1969 Forsell worked as a travelling lecturer engaged by the Swedish school board, touring the country to show his images and speak about photographic art and the people he had met. He became in this way both a practitioner and a populariser of photography during a period when the medium was gaining serious cultural recognition in Sweden.
At auction, Forsell's works appear primarily at regional Swedish houses including Limhamns Auktionsbyrå, Auctionet, and Auktionshuset Thelin and Johansson. His subjects are documented with dated titles - 'Per Wilhelm Johansson' (1962), 'Fins Erik' (1947), 'Rens-Erik' (1963) - suggesting a meticulous archival approach to his own practice. He is represented in the Wikidata database as Q5737033.