A Minor Wrong Doing [Signed]

Softcover with embossing and silver ink on black paper
288 pages
Design and editing by Henrik Malmström and Misha Kominek
Limited Edition of 375 copies
July 2015
Kominek Books

Slowly but steadily we become immersed in what Henrik Malmström saw and photographed from the window of his living room. The pages of A Minor Wrongdoing unfold as a hypnotic sequence of candid shots taken in the neighbourhood of St. Georg in Hamburg between 2011 and 2014.

Hundreds of images record the last remains of street life in an urban area currently undergoing fierce gentrification after recent official law enforcement against street-based prostitution. Malmström used a cheap digital camera, forcing its ISO levels to reproduce in each scene the raw effect of a surveillance camera.

The grainy monochromatic material of his voyeuristic enterprise has been assembled into this voluminous book, replicating a messy police report archive. Printed in sharp dots, the grain adds an unprecedented level of abstraction and beauty to the sequence, while the quantity of images breaks with the conventional linear story structure.

There is an uncanny feeling to it. And obsession: the unconfessed obsession of a photographer who happened to be in the right place at the right time. We do not get to see much of what he photographed, but we can still imagine what might be happening in this obscure underworld of transactions.

Finnish photographer Henrik Malmström (b. 1983) currently lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His work is often the result of the interaction with his immediate surroundings. In 2010 he self-published On Borrowed Time, his first book of photographs. In the same year he moved to Hamburg, Germany, where he developed and completed his two projects A Minor Wrongdoing and Life is One Live it Well by 2014.

He is the co-founder and curator of the Müllkellergalerie, a premium art gallery located in a garbage room in Hamburg, Germany. In 2015 he co-founded the online platform Vaciarte, which deals with arts and politics in Buenos Aires.