In the early 1970s, Aspudden, a neighborhood in southern Stockholm, was a worn-down district of small apartments and unsettled lives, with many older men among residents housed through social services. Kjell-Åke Andersson moved there with his wife and daughter and his camera, and for three years photographed his neighbors, the street, and the interiors where the neighborhood gathered. The result, published by Stockholmia in 2023, is Kära Aspudden: a sustained record of a community at a specific and unrepeatable moment, made by someone who belonged to it rather than passing through.

The book assembles roughly a hundred black-and-white photographs from that period, selected and sequenced with the designer Anton Hull and edited by Bo Larsson. Their arrangement gives the pictures a tempo; the warmth Andersson felt for his subjects holds together with an unsentimental awareness of hardship, so that affection and clear sight are not in conflict. Set alongside the images is a long interview with Björn Qvarnström, one of Andersson’s friends from those years and a lifelong Aspudden resident, whose account runs from childhood to the present and is interwoven with historical detail about the district’s development.

That pairing matters. Aspudden today is a prosperous neighborhood with high housing prices; the friends who populate these pages are no longer the people who live there. By joining photographs of a limited period with a spoken testimony that stretches across decades, Kära Aspudden keeps a half-century-old way of life legible and specific rather than nostalgic. It was shortlisted for the Swedish Photobook Prize in 2024.

For collectors attentive to Nordic documentary work and to books that test how photographs and lived testimony can share a page, this is a considered example: a district portrait made from within, published in Swedish by Stockholmia and offered in a hardcover edition.