Björn Ylinenpää
сту

Been stalking around on this forum for quite a while now, and i thought that i should introduce myself. Thought i should do it by posting a photo taken with a Zorki-4 + Jupiter 8. The film used is Efke 50, developed in Rodinal.
This is a photograph from a dead and abandoned factory. Scharins Unitex was once one of the largest employers in my hometown. Together with the Rönnskär smelting works (still alive) they formed the industrial backbone around which my hometown was built. When the factory was at it's peak 1500 people worked there. It started out in the 19th century as a saw mill but later it produced wood pulp, fibreboard and impregnated wood. In the 1920's and 30's the unions and the workers fought for better wages and working conditions at Scharins. In 1932, a year after the Ådalen shootings where military killed five protesting workers, riots broke out at Scharins after the company hired strike breakers. A local policeman opened fire but nobody was hit. Had somebody been killed, then revolution wouldn't have been far away.
Bad management and harsh competiotion caused the steady decline of the company and in 1993 the factory closed for good. The arsenic, mercury and dioxins from Scharins polluted the soil and the sediment of the nearby river and today it is one of the most polluted placs in Sweden. Because of this nobody has claimed ownership or responsibilty for area, since swedish law states that the owner must decontaminate the area, which would be very expensive. So the buildings just sit there with broken windows and covered in graffiti.
For me Scharins tells so many stories. Walking around the deserted factory buildings you are struck by the silence, what really should be a place filled with movement and noise is quiet and empty. You can still find spare parts in there boxes, and in the office supply room you can find discettes and paper for the now ancient computers and printers waiting on their desks.
Scharins is very popular among local photographers, and everything has been photographed. Despite that i always return, fascinated by it's stories.
- - - -
What about me then? Well, I'm 21 years old. I study russian at the university in Umeå. I love photography and what it can tell us. Since I like mechanical things I own too many cameras, mostly from the FSU! However I would say that the cameras themselves doesn't mean much to me, they are secondary to the photography and storytelling. But that doesn't mean that the cameras aren't interesting themselves, they also tell us a story of the period that they were made in and about the people that designed and used them.
BTW, sorry for any spelling mistakes or grammatical errors. But you probably understand bad english better than perfect swedish!😉
This is a photograph from a dead and abandoned factory. Scharins Unitex was once one of the largest employers in my hometown. Together with the Rönnskär smelting works (still alive) they formed the industrial backbone around which my hometown was built. When the factory was at it's peak 1500 people worked there. It started out in the 19th century as a saw mill but later it produced wood pulp, fibreboard and impregnated wood. In the 1920's and 30's the unions and the workers fought for better wages and working conditions at Scharins. In 1932, a year after the Ådalen shootings where military killed five protesting workers, riots broke out at Scharins after the company hired strike breakers. A local policeman opened fire but nobody was hit. Had somebody been killed, then revolution wouldn't have been far away.
Bad management and harsh competiotion caused the steady decline of the company and in 1993 the factory closed for good. The arsenic, mercury and dioxins from Scharins polluted the soil and the sediment of the nearby river and today it is one of the most polluted placs in Sweden. Because of this nobody has claimed ownership or responsibilty for area, since swedish law states that the owner must decontaminate the area, which would be very expensive. So the buildings just sit there with broken windows and covered in graffiti.
For me Scharins tells so many stories. Walking around the deserted factory buildings you are struck by the silence, what really should be a place filled with movement and noise is quiet and empty. You can still find spare parts in there boxes, and in the office supply room you can find discettes and paper for the now ancient computers and printers waiting on their desks.
Scharins is very popular among local photographers, and everything has been photographed. Despite that i always return, fascinated by it's stories.
- - - -
What about me then? Well, I'm 21 years old. I study russian at the university in Umeå. I love photography and what it can tell us. Since I like mechanical things I own too many cameras, mostly from the FSU! However I would say that the cameras themselves doesn't mean much to me, they are secondary to the photography and storytelling. But that doesn't mean that the cameras aren't interesting themselves, they also tell us a story of the period that they were made in and about the people that designed and used them.
BTW, sorry for any spelling mistakes or grammatical errors. But you probably understand bad english better than perfect swedish!😉
