Case Closed is not a new body of work but an old one seen again. Published in 2022 by Wagstrombooks, the book gathers photographs Thomas Wågström made across a long career and reorders them outside chronology or chapter divisions. What emerges is a single flow of images, drawn from roughly ten earlier photobook projects, in which 18 of the 135 pictures had never previously been shown.

Wågström is the photographer, and the credit belongs to him alone; the essays are by Karl Ove Knausgård and Niclas Östlind, who wrote alongside the pictures rather than authoring them. Wågström also designed the volume, and the sequencing is the point. New adjacencies and transitions were chosen to unsettle expectation and keep the pages turning; a single photograph carries one weight in its original project, another beside a stranger decades on. In an artist’s practice already drawn to enigma and the conditions of being alive, repetition works as intensification: motifs deepen, then spread.

The photographs are brought together as a new encounter with an existing body of work. The essays provide another route into this encounter, while the sequence allows images to suggest connections without turning them into a single explanation. For a collector, the relevant facts are plain and verifiable: the plates here are re-culled from a prior published oeuvre, and the arrangement is new.

Case Closed was nominated for the Svenska Fotobokspriset in 2024, and Svensk Bokkonst recognised it in 2023 for particularly good book form. Those are institutional judgments about the object as made, not claims about scarcity or market value. A collection that treats its own back catalogue as raw material, and asks a reader to move through it without a map, rewards the kind of attention a photobook collection is for.