Wikiland, 23 June, 2017 / Sunny 16 Rule (2017)

The third part of the Wikiland project is set in 2017, when Swedish prosecutors dropped the investigation into rape and applied to revoke the European arrest warrant. On Swedish Midsummer’s Day, June 23, 2017 – marking the brightest day of the year – Källström-Fäldt visited Assange in the Embassy of Ecuador in London, equipped with an analogue medium-format camera and one roll of film. In accordance with the Sunny 16 Rule – which is a method in photography of estimating correct daylight without a light meter – they took ten portraits of Assange. However, as the light conditions in the room were so poor, the portraits turned out completely dark. The last frame was taken with a flash and the resulting image only revealed Assange’s silhouette. Once again, his portrait remained elusive.

The Julian Assange case has been described as one of the biggest legal scandals in Sweden and an instance of human rights violations. One example of the misconducts is the correspondence between authorities in Sweden and the United Kingdom which reveals major flaws in the handling of the matter over the past decade. The imprisonment of Assange remains one of the most egregious attacks on press freedom of our time.

Klara Källström & Thobias Fäldt and Johannes Wahlström, 2017
Book made together with Mane Radmanović, B-B-B-Books, 2017