There are many beautiful and great things about Sweden. Maybe the cold winter is a drawback but you get an endless summer later in the year. And even considering the whole country as a big sleepy town as suggested by Ann Sofie-Back, the country breeds incredible designers of all capacities in whatever discipline in most particular, architecture, interior and product design. It’s more of an encompassing thought that design in its basic principles can be applied to anything as Vignelli puts it ‘Design Is One’. Current contemporaries include Olle Eksell who only passed away last year from a wonderful career, womenswear designer Ann Sofie-Back, studio RGB6, portraiture extraordinare Jenny Mörtsell and Front Design just to name a few.

Swedish art-director and photographer Martin Vallin’s work is even more interesting, which is not to say when looking at editorial shoots for various fashion magazines isn’t good, his compositional work strucks out most with him ultilising still life objects and made props from a Chanel ankle boot shoe to checkered ties and bowler hats. If we look at vintage Vogue Paris covers, the design was beautiful and still remain timeless because of the front cover colour illustrations until it was in vogue to use models as a backdrop to Vogue’s bold title. Martin has captured a strong collection of compositions that is both slightly retrospective but a modern reinterpretation of how still life objects can be personified and bring emotion and character from just within one page.

Martin Vallin is a Swedish born art-director and photographer working and living in Stockholm since 2005. His love for literature, books and fine art including movements such as De Stijl has allowed him to work at Wad Magazine in Paris and Bon Magazine shooting for numerous magazines and editorials including Slash Magazine.

To view a complete selection of Martin’s work, please visit here. Please also view his personal blog which contains many interesting snippets of his daily working process here.

Martin Vallin

Tags: Martin Vallin, Slash Magazine, Sweden

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 27th, 2008 at 12:39 pm and is filed under Design, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.