Älskling – a self-portrait through the eyes of my lovers

My intention was to make a self-portrait made by other people. Their way to experience me would stay in the foreground. I was asking my ex boyfriends and lovers to give me all the pictures they took of me during our relationship. The pictures I got were from a twenty-five years period of time. The first photo was done when I was nineteen, the last one this year when I’m forty-five. The series contains fifty-five photographs and has nine different authors. I’m presenting the pictures in a chronological order.

The work can be seen as biographical work, telling about a part of my life, but it’s also an indirect portrait of the photographer, the partner behind the camera. An aspect that is interesting to me is the special way of looking at each other when you are in love. These pictures can be seen as an attempt capture closeness and attraction between two people within a photograph.

Jenny Rova (1972) is a Swedish photographer who lives in Zürich since 2001. She works between Sweden and Switzerland. Her work ‘ÄLSKLING a self-portrait through the eyes of my lovers’ was the winner of the Swedish Photo Book Award 2018.