by Xenia Nikolskaya
There is a basement in every Stockholm building, where we store stuff we don’t need daily, like a bike, summer furniture, or a folded bed, in case of unexpected guests. Once upon a time, I was going through my basement in Gardet. While arranging my things, I noticed an old suitcase in the corner, left outside of many personal cells. It was made of fake leather with lovely metal fittings, like the one from a spy movie.
Inside the suitcase was a treasure: slides, multiple rolls of 35 mm films in tiny Kodak containers, slide projector trays, and letters. As a photographer, I naturally thought of Robert Capa's Mexican Suitcase. The names on the envelopes looked familiar. My husband recalled that this name used to be on the door of the building. It looks like the lost suitcase belonged to the person who used to be our neighbor.
The building was constructed in 1963, and by 2017 there were still a few old tenants left, who moved in right after construction was finished. The mysterious photographer was one of them.
After thoughtful research, we figured out the name of this talented amateur!
Engineer Hugo Agnvall, who died in 2000, was providing Ericsson’s telephone system for foreign markets, specifically for the Middle East. His first foreign job was in Beirut between 1965-69, then his family moved to Tunisia (1979 - 1984) and he also covered Algeria from there. In his Kodakhromes we see Istanbul, Zurich, and Beirut, as well as Stockholm's new quarters; picnics, X-mas parties, family gatherings, and weddings; airports and harbors; offices and country homes; winters and springs; children and adults and even Evert Taube outside an airplane (Swedish national poet and singer). This archive is a beautiful record of Sweden in the late 1960s when you would dress up for the walk with your kid, and a bow tie was a daily fashion. Sweden that we lost; one might say...
This archive material is not just good-looking pictures taken by the curious amateur, but an encyclopedia of Swedish life.
Xenia Nikolskaya
Cairo-Stockholm
December 2024
Xenia Nikolskaya is an award-winning Russian-Swedish photographer, curator, and educator currently based in Cairo. A former curator of the Russian National Centre of Photography and former head of Rossiya Segodnya’s exhibition project department, she is a Fulbright Fellow with a PhD from Sunderland University, UK. She has taken part in more than forty international exhibitions and her works are preserved at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. She is the author of The House My Grandfather Built, which won the 2021 Swedish Photobook Award, and Dust: Egypt's Forgotten Architecture, Revised and Expanded.
