Poste Restante by Christer Strömholm is a reflective exploration of human existence, shaped by his extensive travels across Europe, Asia, and Africa from the late 1940s through 1968. The project is deeply situated within the post-World War II context, an era marked by existential introspection, social displacement, and cultural shifts toward individual narratives. Strömholm, having personally experienced the war through active participation in the Norwegian resistance, brought a deeply personal dimension to the work.
Artistically, Poste Restante reflects a sustained meditation on death and transience, marked by a visual repertoire that includes symbols of decay, isolation, and absence. Strömholm’s attention to mortality, which intensified in the mid-1950s, led to the inclusion of images that dwell on emptiness and death, not merely as documentary observations but as means to process personal loss and existential uncertainty. These themes are filtered through a subjective and autobiographical lens, revealing an internal dialogue shaped by his father’s suicide and his experience of war.
Strömholm's aesthetic style is distinctly defined by black-and-white imagery, enhancing the project's introspective and enigmatic atmosphere. His compositions frequently employ central framing and isolation techniques, where subjects are visually detached within the photograph’s spatial confines. The resulting images often possess a mysterious and unsettling quality, rooted in their visual ambiguity.
Published in 1967, Poste Restante drew mixed reviews and modest sales, but its images soon anchored major exhibitions—most notably 9 sekunder av mitt liv at Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1986). Strömholm was appointed Professor of Photography by the Swedish government in 1993 and received the Hasselblad Award in 1997, with Poste Restante regarded as a cornerstone of that recognition. The book re-entered circulation with a bilingual reprint and a site-specific presentation at Mindepartementet, Stockholm (2016), and continues to be revisited in retrospectives and scholarly surveys, such as Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid (2024).
