Kajsa Gullberg’s The House of Mirrors began not as an assignment but as a personal search. In the autumn of 2017, Gullberg visited a swingers club in her home city, initially to broaden her own understanding of herself and her sexuality. What she found there surprised her: a rare environment where she felt physically safe, where women of varied ages, sizes, and appearances were desired, and where desire could be expressed without shame. The book, published by Dewi Lewis in 2020, is the outcome of that experience. It comprises 128 pages and 74 colour plates, presented in a quarterbound Swiss-bound hardback designed to be handled and looked at closely.
Gullberg worked with the trust of the club’s users and owners, eventually bringing her camera into the space. Crucially, she states that the project is not a documentary about a swingers club. Instead, it is a comment on what it is to exist in a female body in contemporary society. That distinction matters. Some photographs recreate scenes as much as they record them; the sequence moves between observation, memory, and imagination. The aim, as Gullberg describes it, is to offer a kaleidoscope or prism through which viewers might see freshly. The title’s mirrors are not props but a method: reflection, distortion, and the multiplication of perspectives.
For collectors of contemporary photography, The House of Mirrors sits within a lineage of work that treats sexuality, gender, and shame as serious artistic subjects rather than tabloid ones. Gullberg’s practice is experience-based and informed by feminist and gender perspectives, with a sustained interest in the psychological and cultural effects of shame. The book’s design—compact in format but substantial in page count—supports an intimate viewing rhythm, allowing the colour plates to function as an extended visual argument rather than a portfolio of isolated images.
The edition is published in English by Dewi Lewis Publishing, an independent press with a long record in photographic books. Its physical construction, a Swiss-bound quarterbound hardback, signals a concern for how the object opens and lies flat, encouraging repeated and careful attention. The project is Gullberg’s own, with no secondary photographers or essayists credited in the available documentation. For those building a collection around the body, desire, and the politics of safety, this is a considered and consequential addition.
