The first part of the 20-day journey covers Stockholm, Sweden.
From Philadelphia, we took Iceland Air to Reykjavik Iceland where we changed planes for the flight to Stockholm. In total, almost nine hours of flight time. Don’t expect much in the way of amenities on Iceland Air. And, when you’re at Reykjavik airport, expect confusion.
Stockholm is the capital of Sweden and spans fourteen main islands on Lake Mälaren which flows into the Baltic Sea and is connected by 54 bridges. In contrast to Venice where the city is sinking, Stockholm is actually rising due to a phenomenon known as postglacial rebound. This is where the land springs up in the absence of the weight of ice sheets from the last ice age. The effects of glacial rebound can be seen in some of the buildings where there is noticeable tilting.
After a 25-minute ride from the airport to our hotel in the heart of downtown Stockholm, we rested for an hour. Then we took on the trail forged by Stieg Larsson in his Millennium Trilogy. This tour can be booked online. For the uninitiated, the first book of Larsson’s trilogy originally took form in the title of “Men Who Hate Women” only for the original German publisher to change it to “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”
The tour starts at #1 Bellmansgatan, Sodermalm where the novel’s protagonist, Mikael Blomkvist, has his apartment. There is no street-level entrance to the apartment. It is accessible only from a second-story bridge that runs over Bellmansgatan to the building.
From this point, the two-hour tour winds its way through the streets of Stockholm to some of the familiar haunts from the novels. If you take this tour you will encounter some true die-hard fans of Stieg Larsson’s work that will have all of the details memorized. Brush up before you go.
View from the top of the Bridge to Blomkvist’s apartment
Bridge leading to Blomkvist’s Apartment
Mural of the Lisbeth Salander character in advance of the next installment in the series.
For fantastic panoramic views, walk from #1 Bellmansgatan about a block and a half up Bastugatan until you see the sign for Monteliusvagen Street. Then hang a right turn and walk up the hill to this high panoramic view to the North including Gamla Stan (The City Between the Bridges). The Town or Old Town as it is known now. Many other historic sites to the North and East in Stockholm are visible from this vantage point.
Stockholm Central Station is a sprawling complex for train and bus departures. There is an outstanding pedestrian arcade with many restaurants and shops. The station is worth checking out both for the shops in the interior and the architecture both inside and out.
If you hail from an English-speaking country you’ll have no trouble navigating your way through the city. Almost all of the locals speak English very well. Swedes generally begin learning English around age seven.
Old Town in Stockholm
Rooftops seen from Monteliusvagen Street
Interior of Stockholm Central Station
A great way to see a lot while in Stockholm is the Hop On, Hop Off buses. They get you around a large part of the city between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. daily. You can even do a Hop On, Hop Off boat tour as part of the bus tour for a few dollars more. If you catch the boat, it will drop you off on any of the nine stops it makes.
For the photographer, get off the boat at the Södermalmstop and go to Photografiska (The Swedish Museum of Photography). The museum and the attached outdoor restaurant offer a great experience.
Across from Photografiska is the small island of Kastellholmen. Here there is a small, but prominent castle that almost rises out of the lake. The castle is sometimes referred to as the Citadel. It has continuously flown the Swedish naval flag since 1665 indicating that the capital city is still under Swedish control.
Looking toward Old Town from the Hop On-Hop Off Boat
The Photography Museum, Fotografiska
Young lady enjoying Photografiska
The Citadel on Kastellholmen
Stockholm has a vibrant shopping district heavily visited by locals and tourists alike. With one million citizens in central Stockholm plus tourists, it can make for a very crowded experience almost anywhere you go. On the corner of Olof Palmes Gata and Drotninggatan, there’s an Espresso House where we stopped for a coffee and some people-watching. The throngs of shoppers were nonstop the entire time. We even witnessed a pedestrian and driver getting into a slap fight in the middle of traffic after the pedestrian made some disparaging remark to the vehicle’s driver.
On Dec. 10 each year, the Nobel Prize awards ceremony is held at the Concert Hall on Haymarket Square. Later that day, a dinner honoring the winners is held at City Hall. The only exception is for the Peace Prize, which is awarded in Oslo, Norway. This is because Nobel felt Norway was the most peaceful country on earth since they had never initiated a war.
There is a lot to see and do in Stockholm. You could easily spend five days or more checking out all the landmarks and other places of interest.
In Stockholm, we board the ship that will take us to our remaining stops. The transit of Lake Mälaren takes about three hours and once we hit the Baltic Sea the ship quickly picks up speed. This journey to Helsinki takes about seventeen hours in total.
Transit of Lake Mälaren
Cover along Lake Mälaren
Editor’s Note: This is a four-part article from our reader, Bob McCormac. It encompasses a 20-day trip to the Nordic countries that spawned the Vikings and where they left their mark on civilization. In most areas, those direct influences have long since been erased but the impact on the cultures is still apparent in each country.
Bob’s father was an avid hobbyist photographer who helped kindle Bob’s interest in photography. When he was about 10 years old, his father noticed his interest in what he did around taking photos. He gave Bob an old ANSCO Readyflash camera that shot 620 film. His father showed Bob the basics which was pretty much just how to load the film, click the shutter, and advance the film to the next frame. He gave him a roll of film and said go try it out.
That was the start of it, although it would be almost another fifteen years after that initial experience before Bob’s interest returned in a measurable way. Since 2011, he’s pursued photography as more than a hobby and looked to be creative in the process.
You can find Bob’s work here:
MirrorPixRare glimpses of a city’s medieval past and long-gone street scenes have been revealed in a collection of photographs that were saved from destruction.
About 800 more negatives, handed to a city archive by a cameraman who saved them from being dumped, also show early excavations for the building of Coventry’s modern cathedral.
They have added to a collection of over 8,000 images taken by Arthur Cooper from the 1930s to the 1960s, and made available to the public as part of the Coventry Digital project.
After the photographer’s death his glass plate negatives, destined for the tip, were rescued by Ian Hollands before the majority were sent to publishing company Mirrorpix.
As well as the city streets, weddings, parades and visiting celebrities are among the collection from the photographer who captured everyday life in the city.
The new collection contained “significant” images that would “greatly enhance” Coventry Cathedral’s archive, said Martin Williams.
The chairman of the Friends of Coventry Cathedral has helped digitize the latest collection as well as identify people and events depicted.
“It’s been quite exciting working through them but some of them were really badly damaged, which is a shame because they are moments in history that have gone,” he said.
Some of the latest collection shows parts of the city’s cathedral and priory site, St Mary’s, dating back to the time of Leofric, the Earl of Mercia and Lady Godiva.
The walls were uncovered during construction of the new cathedral in the mid-1950s.
The photographs “show the scale of the priory complex,” destroyed following the dissolution of the monasteries, said Mr Williams.
City archaeologist at the time, John Shelton, can be seen pictured at the site, he explained.
“He tried to preserve the history of the city before we did archaeology in a big official way, before it became as important as we regard it today,” he added.
There was little organisation in the city at the time “that could bring pressure to bear to make sure our archaeological sites were properly examined,” added Dr Ben Kyneswood, director of the Coventry University initiative.
“What I like about these photographs is they give you a real sense that there is archaeology there, going back a thousand years, nearly, and I’d never seen that before.”
“If it were today there would have been some significant research involved,” he added.
Other pictures show hundreds of concrete piles being driven to form the cathedral’s foundations, and pre-war streets already being cleared under plans to modernise the city, before German bombing accelerated the process.
A mid-1930s view of the city centre shows how planners had “completely changed the road system,” added Dr Kyneswood.
“This whole area was a very narrow medieval street pattern that was all cleared to make way for this brand new Trinity Street which allowed the traffic – increasingly larger vehicles and buses – to travel through through the city centre.”
“Unfortunately, Coventry had a council at the time that was only looking in one direction,” he added, leading to the “tragic” destruction of many mediaeval buildings.
Another picture show a visit to the city by actor Edward G Robinson, who had been identified by members of the Friends of Coventry Cathedral, said Mr Williams.
“My guess is that he visited Coventry in the summer of 1962 and contrary to the gangster image that he portrayed in many of his roles, he was in person a gentle man with a serious interest in art.”
An image of Pearl Hyde, the first female Lord Mayor of the city, pictured with a Russian icon, was another favourite, he said.
“[The icon] arrived in a parcel with no information so she took it over to the cathedral because she thought it was perhaps a place that should have it,” he explained.
“And then about six weeks later a letter arrived saying it was a gift from Kazan Cathedral in Stalingrad.”
Dr Kyneswood said he would again be working with volunteers around the city to crowdsource information about the photographs.
“The pictures are brilliant, but the main thing is people like Martin and the Historic Coventry Forum and other groups have logged in and said ‘this is what you’re looking at,’ and they’ve told the story, and it’s their version of history.
“And suddenly we get a biography of the photo, which is way more than you would ordinarily get if you go on any website,” he said.
The work with Mirrorpix and owner Reach PLC on the Arthur Cooper collection was “really important, because it is telling that kind of street-level working class stories,” he added.
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The 24 Paragons of Filial Piety is a series of traditional Chinese folk tales that illustrate acts of extreme loyalty performed by children for their parents. The Hong Kong artist Fion Hung Ching-Yan has used those stories – which her father used to tell her at bedtime – as the visual stimuli for her series of therapeutic pictures, The Skeletons in the Closet. Think Eminem meets Confucius.
This image, now on show in Brighton, is based on the ancient story of the child who visits a family friend in a distant province and is given a mandarin orange. The family friend observes the child stealing two more oranges and hiding them in his sleeve. The host’s anger at the theft turns to praise, however, when he discovers that the child has taken the fruit not for himself but for his mother at home. Hung, it seems, is not wholly convinced by the implied guilt trip of that parable – the moral of her updated story is that there would never be enough oranges to satisfy the demands of her parents; she needs one or two for herself.
The series was prompted by the death of Hung’s grandmother in 2016, which exposed family secrets in conflicts over inheritance. The trauma of those arguments prompted her to pick up a camera and find a language for her stress. Speaking of the continuing project, she says: “I perform different bodily gestures and seemingly inappropriate acts to push against the institution of the ideal Chinese family.” In another picture, which illustrates the jolly story of a boy who willingly sleeps with his shirt off, offering his skin to mosquitoes so his parents don’t get bitten, her kitchen floor is filled with tumblers of blood-like liquid. Once again, however, a single, subversive artist’s hand is present to remove the only glass of water.
A nude woman reclines on a tumble of fabric, a flower in her hair and bracelet on her wrist, frankly challenging the viewer with her gaze. It’s almost Manet’s Olympia, but not quite. This photograph is an Autochrome, the process invented by Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1904 and explored by the Observer Magazine on 2 November 1980, with recently unearthed images from the French Photographic Society.
Autochrome was an early answer to frustration at the limitations of photography in capturing the colour and complexity of real life and its secret was an ‘unlikely ingredient’: potato starch. ‘Minute grains of starch were dyed in primary colours, carefully mixed and held on a glass plate with silver bromide solution.’
It was instantly popular and the Lumière brothers struggled to meet demand, particularly from the Pictorialists, pioneers who viewed photography as an art form full of possibility rather than a documentary process. They appreciated Autochrome as it ‘gave an effect of shimmering colour reminiscent of that achieved by the most laborious Impressionist techniques – a kind of painless Pointillism’.
The influence of the Impressionists and their forebears does shimmer through these dreamy, painterly images. A white-shirted worker bending in a hayfield feels composed by Millet, painted by Morisot. Women wash clothes on a sun-dappled riverbank, one cross-legged girl in red staring curiously at the camera, in the kind of scene beloved of Pissarro.
Extra-long exposure times – 30 times longer than black and white – meant discomfort was an inevitable part of the process: a woman in a wide-brimmed hat topped with an extravagantly large and droopy red flower perches uneasily on the edge of a cornfield holding a bouquet of wildflowers. And there’s a reminder that the ‘tranquil beauty’ and ease of this gilded fin-de-siècle came at a human price: against the bulk of a dresser filled with blue and white plates, a maid in a blue apron droops in sleep, feather duster falling from her hand.
