Kult Books

In January 2012, Henri Airo’s little sister was killed in a hit-and-run by a repeat drunk driver. In that instant, his family’s life was divided into what was before and after.

While the Airo family struggled with the loss, the national media covered the crash and the subsequent police investigation extensively. The police focused on technical details—crash simulations, blood tests—while media narratives reduced the case to a drama between the innocent victim and the malicious perpetrator. The resulting documents and reports examined drunk driving and alcoholism in Finnish society but largely ignored the social circumstances surrounding addiction.

In 2018 Airo came across the original police report. It felt incomplete. Together with primary eye-witnesses and actors, Airo began to re-visualise scenes which had been glossed over in the documents.

Probable Cause draws on media and police archives, re-enactment and Airo’s personal testimony to understand the circumstances of his sister’s death. By restructuring existing narratives, the project reveals multiple personal perspectives embedded within the official record. In reconstructing the perpetrator’s day, speculation and doubt become entry points for reflecting on how addiction is perceived in Finnish society.

We live in times marked by authoritarianism, violence, and a disregard for human rights. The world feels divided and paralyzed, and this climate of uncertainty takes photographer Jens Olof Lasthein back to another tumultuous time.

In the winter of 1991–92, Lasthein walked up and down Stockholm’s main pedestrian street, Drottninggatan, photographing people. He felt uneasy as his immediate world grew increasingly unsettled. The war in Croatia was clearly about to spread to Bosnia, the true melting pot of the former Yugoslavia. The Soviet Union was dissolving and formally ceased to exist on New Year’s Eve. At the same time, a man who came to be known as the “Laser Man” had begun shooting immigrants in Stockholm.

With his camera’s standard lens and focus fixed at one meter, Lasthein reacts quickly and intuitively—one flash exposure per person as they pass by. Some notice him, but most are so deeply lost in their own thoughts that they do not realize they are being captured on film. Everyone has their own story, their own small world, yet everyone threads their way through the crowd. The individual. The collective. And the shared world, fragmented and diverse though it may be. In the photographs, Lasthein saw reflections of his own unease.

Now, 34 years later, those expressions mirror Lasthein’s state of mind today. Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine is entering its fifth year with undiminished force. Israel’s government continues to bomb, displace, and starve the Palestinian population. Democratic principles and international law are being abandoned in the United States, while the climate crisis accelerates. Amid all this, individuals move through their own small worlds, carrying their worries alone.

In his debut book Filling in the Gaps, Marcus Gustafsson explores a deeply personal and complex narrative about his father’s alcoholism and its impact on himself and his family. The project reconciles fragmented memories to better understand the circumstances that have shaped his life and relationships, while also serving as an effort toward healing and reconnecting with his fractured family. It confronts the duality of growing up with an alcoholic parent—the struggle to break free while remaining bound by a shared history—and the void left behind when the family’s unifying figure is gone. The work examines how addiction alters family dynamics, leaves lasting marks, and challenges the possibility of moving forward.

In Filling in the Gaps, Marcus combines his own images with archival family photographs. His visual language is raw yet stylized, documenting his father’s daily life and surroundings while also turning the camera toward himself, reflecting the tension between reality and memory. Altered family photos—taped or drawn over—become acts of reclamation, as he infuses inherited memories with his own voice.

Filling in the Gaps is an emotional exploration of trauma, showing how revisiting painful memories can open paths toward reconciliation and peace with the past.

In 2022, photographer Ivan Anisimov left Russia and spent the next two years in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. There, he encountered the quiet weight of displacement — the sense of estrangement, of living under the gaze of others shaped by history and politics. Like many migrants, he navigated not only a new city but also the unseen boundaries of perception and belonging, where every encounter carried echoes of conflict and the search for home.

Ivan started to wander the streets of Tbilisi, taking in the city’s corners and faces. Movement became his way of thinking, wandering his state of mind. What caught his attention were the local men — their shoes and trousers, the textures, folds, and forms, and the way their slightly too long pants draped over their shoes. Through the fleeting photographs of passersby’s feet, Pants on Top of Shoes becomes a meditation on modern alienation — people adrift in the flow of life, half-asleep, half-aware, caught in a quiet hypnosis of movement and solitude.

In his debut monograph, Luoghi, Nicola Buonomo deepens his engagement with nine familiar places. Ranging from his grandmother's backyard to a sand production facility nearby, these are all within a few kilometers of Nicola’s home in Northern Sicily, Italy. The photographs display a subtly dissonant relationship between man-made infrastructure and the natural world.

Nicola first defined a clear perimeter for each area, outside of which he could not photograph. In creating these limitations, he ambitiously sought to exhaust most of the possibilities of his gaze within them- prompting a repetitive style of shooting. Sometimes photographing a single subject many times, Nicola forced himself to find new relationships with what he already knew well. In this attempt to enrich his relationship with the familiar, Nicola’s process became synonymous with the final work.

In 1929, Jenni Toivonen’s great-grandparents left everything behind and relocated their family to Brazil. They were part of a group of Finns, led by pastor and gardener Toivo Uuskallio, who hoped to separate themselves from capitalist society and live in harmony with nature. They settled on land surrounded by the Atlantic Forest in the state of Rio de Janeiro, where they founded the community of Penedo. Penedo went on to become one of the most well-known examples of Finnish utopian migration, a movement of similar instances occurring from the late 1800’s to the early 1900’s. Many memories from this time in Jenni’s family are preserved through her grandaunt’s writings, photographs, Brazilian music and stories- which continue to circulate and evolve through generations.

Prompted by the nostalgic but vivid world her grandaunt had depicted, Jenni set out to experience it herself. She longed to plunge into the clear mountain rivers and feel a deep, radiant connection with the forest. In revisiting the location her grandparents had inhabited, she strove to experience a shimmer of the utopia Uuskallio spoke of a century ago.

The book Reversed Surveillance is a visualization of invasive surveillance technologies, challenging the prospect of automating crime detection during protests in France. The project reflects on the development and legislation of mass surveillance by offering a case study on how individuals can protect themselves using the very tools with which they are surveilled. The project bases on the idea that since it is unlikely to fully revert surveillance and its effects on society, society should explore ways to reverse its impact. In Reversed Surveillance, Marcel Top demonstrates the potential of reversing surveillance dynamics to protect the right to protest: by gaining knowledge of accessible surveillance tools, it is possible to ensure police accountability.

Marcel Top is a visual artist living and working between Belgium and London. His work explores themes of mass surveillance, privacy, and data collection. In his practice, Top blends traditional documentary research with experimental uses of new technologies. He initiated the Reversed Surveillance project following the enactment of new legislation allowing the use of AI-enhanced surveillance in France (Law No. 2023-380), using accessible algorithms and available protest footage to simulate how the use of Algorithmic Video Surveillance (AVS) can impact protesters.

La Soufrière captures a poignant reunion between a father and son after 25 years apart. Swedish photographer Kristian Krän travels to the island of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean to meet his father, Arthur — a meeting that turns out to be both their first and their last. Arthur had left the family when Kristian was just two years old. It was only years later that Kristian learned of his father’s existence and his longstanding mental illness.

To meet Arthur and gain understanding, Kristian journeys to Basse-Terre, the capital of Guadeloupe, a quiet town with a shrinking population of around 10,000. Over the course of a week, they explore the island together, visiting places Arthur wants to show Kristian. Communication is difficult, as Kristian’s understanding of Guadeloupean Creole French is limited. Instead, they spend much of their time bonding through music. Kristian’s camera becomes an essential bridge between them, serving as both a means of connection and a source of comfort.

One day, they hiked to the top of the volcano La Grande Soufrière. Arthur, dressed in a blazer and flip-flops, kept vanishing and reappearing in the mist. The volcano, a place where some of their most significant memories were made, inspired the book’s title. The word “soufrière” comes from the French “soufre,” meaning sulfur or to sulfurize—a kind of sulfurous condemnation. Phonetically, it closely resembles “souffrir,” the verb meaning to suffer and endure.

Between the finite human life and death, there is a suspended moment in which one passes from one to the other. Those who bear witness to this transition are the caretakers responsible for performing the final treatment. They cleanse the bodies, dress them, comb their hair and arrange them in a peaceful repose for the very last time. The caretakers attend to the deceased almost as if they were living, a testament to a uniquely human trait that has existed throughout time and across all cultures. The performance of these last rituals is a human way to demonstrate the ability to face and address mortality. In her debut book Transi, Margot Jourquin documents this liminal instant between the two realms and the people who prepare the dead for their burial.

In 1961, in the small Spanish village of San Sebastian de Garabandal, four young girls had an apparition of the Virgin Mary. They entered a state of ecstasy in which they became completely unaware of their surroundings and sensory perceptions. Reportedly, witnesses would pinch the girls, pierce their skin with needles, lift them up and drop them onto rough rocks, and yet they remained entranced. The light and presence of the Virgin is all they claim to have experienced. Twenty years later, in the town of Medjugorje, in Bosnia & Herzegovina, six children also had simultaneous visions of the Virgin, with similar ecstatic qualities.

In his debut book Noema Michael Swann investigates the aura of place and religious experience by searching for signs of the Virgin Mary’s presence in these two locations. Alongside original photographs made at both sites, Noema also includes images that have been appropriated from video footage of the visionaries taken during their apparitions. These emphasise the impenetrability of the individual religious and phenomenological experience, and speaks to the separation between what is apparently being seen and what is photographable.