Andy Allen-Olivar & Nils Johansson Photographs

Andy Allen-Olivar (b. 1995) has always been fascinated by traces and rituals of the postal system. “These days, the physical act of sending a particular postcard with my unique handwriting to a specific person, which only the post can deliver to the receiver’s mailbox, feels sacred. It maintains a continuity through these steps without being broken down and pulled apart by codes and signals.”. In this project, he has worked with the simplest form of a camera, a pinhole camera – where photographic paper is placed inside a cardboard box with a hole smaller than a needle to act as the lens. He then sent many boxes of varying size and dimension through the post, exposing the photographic paper during their voyages from being handed into PostNord depot, to when they were delivered back to himself at his home on that same street.

In our collections, we have many photos taken by the mail carrier Nils Johansson.Throughout his working life, he photographed his colleagues. He traveled across Sweden from north to south, documenting what it was like to work in the postal service. Many of his images became features in the staff magazine P.S. In all his pictures, we see the respect and understanding for the work.