Johannes Samuelsson

Since 2012, artist and photographer Johannes Samuelsson has been documenting the varying working situations and conditions of the Swedish berry industry in Norrland, showing how this once localised practice has been globalised into an industry that forms ‘new geographies of inequality’.

The invention of temperature-controlled storage and transportation has been central to the globalised food system, transforming the once gentle Swedish pastime of wild berry-picking into a large-scale, superfood industry. In his ongoing project, Berry Seasons, Johannes Samuelsson has approached the often-obscured structural problems of the global berry industry in Norrland by combining short prose texts with detail-focused documentary photography. The project carefully frames together the raw material supply chain of berry picking, storage, and distribution in Norrland with the challenging working and living conditions faced by the berry pickers, seasonal workers who are often migrants, and the practices of everyday subsistence and resistance they have developed to overcome them.

At Havremagasinet, Samuelsson has been invited to exhibit a new series of photographs from Boden and Gunnarsbyn that were taken in 2022. These pictures form a new chapter of the project.

Johannes Samuelsson is an artist and documentary photographer working in Umeå. Within his art practice, he uses journalistic, essayistic and documentary working methods, and often investigates the role of art in social planning processes.