Under The Chestnut tree _ Adam and Eve. Palimpsest.
About
My fascination with photography was born out of the darkroom in the late 1990s — that quiet alchemy where shadows gathered and slowly took form under red light, as if summoned by a kind of magic.
I am drawn to places that remember: overgrown gardens, old buildings, objects marked by handling and time. I go there to gather — fragments, traces, presences. My work emerges through accumulation: personal observation layered with inherited imagery, collective memory, and traces of other lives and makers. I layer these elements with my own photographs, working with light, shadow, and absence until what was always there begins to emerge.
Photography has always carried a strange relationship to time. What it shows is visibly present, yet already gone. In my work, I lean into that tension, allowing different times, memories, and presences to exist simultaneously within the same image surface.
My work explores spaces where the wild is framed, contained, or ritualized — gardens, houses, books, and photographic surfaces. The female figure moves through these spaces not as a fixed subject, but as a force — continuous with the natural world, emerging and receding within it. She is never fully revealed, but remains suspended between presence and disappearance, carrying something that cannot entirely be seen, yet persists.
Origins.
Anja Axelsson has always been interested in what we choose to place inside a frame — and more often than not, it is not the obvious thing that draws her attention, but the peripheral: the almost seen, the space around the subject as much as the subject itself.
Attuned early to framing and composition, she studied scenography at Nottingham Trent University, where the camera became a way of holding constructed worlds. A decade as a photojournalist in the UK sharpened her eye, but the pull toward shaping the image — not only witnessing it — remained.
After becoming a mother, she moved to the Swedish countryside and turned her lens toward the flora on her doorstep. These botanical studies were precise and luminous, each form held against black. Yet the stillness of perfection revealed its limits. Returning to Sweden with a child of her own brought her closer to questions of heritage, history, and memory — to the feeling that time is not linear, but layered, carrying traces and presences that never entirely disappear.
She now moves through old houses, overgrown gardens, and historical materials, gathering fragments and surfaces marked by time. Her work emerges through accumulation: personal observation layered with inherited imagery, collective memory, and traces of other lives and makers. Working with light, shadow, and absence as much as form, she creates images that exist between document and invention — where what is seen and what is sensed begin to overlap.