Setanta Books published 020 – Fredrik Axling in 2024, the twentieth instalment of a bi-monthly series devoted to emerging photographers. The book runs forty-eight pages in softcover, measuring 21 by 16 centimetres and issued with a card wraparound cover in an edition of 350 copies. All photographs are by Fredrik Axling.

The pictures come from the first three years of Axling’s engagement with photography, which began after more than a decade spent making electronic music in his spare time. Having sold his studio, he bought a camera and walked the city, and the sequence carries the velocity of that shift: a practice forming in real time rather than a settled style presented after the fact. Axling has described wanting people in his frames, and the streets supply them obliquely, through gestures, silhouettes, and passing figures held inside a patient attention to architectural form, reflections, and shadow.

His stated interests — unrest, loneliness, nostalgia, a general melancholy — read as tonal coordinates rather than themes imposed on the work. They give the book its emotional register, and they place it within a recognisable mode of Nordic street photography attentive to long light and quiet incident. The series format itself matters: each title is a compact, quickly made document of a young practice, and the twentieth entry testifies to the consistency of that editorial project as much as to the individual voice.

The book belongs to the line that began with Luka Khabelashvili and continued through Margaret Durow, Nick Prideaux, Joakim Möller, and others. For a collector, its interest lies in that lineage: a numbered series, produced at a steady rhythm, in which each title records an early body of work during a period when the photographer is still finding a language. A special edition adds a signed and numbered Giclée print.