Curtis Blair

Curtis Blair fixated on Scandinavia—Sweden especially, Iceland, Norway—and made a series photographing women up there. Nordic Girls, he called it, shot in 2015 with Swedish models in London and Stockholm. There’s a book from it.

What interests me isn’t the obvious thing (blonde, tall, beautiful, all that). It’s how Blair describes what he actually sees: women who are genuinely free, genuinely self-possessed in a way most photographs don’t show. They’re part of a new feminist wave in the North, the generation that reclaimed the female body by refusing to hide it—body hair, menstruation, all of it just there. He photographs that refusal.

The work is patient. Analog, cool-lit, no softness or flattery. You can feel the film stock. The backgrounds—dark forests, clean lakes—feel observed rather than constructed. Most photographers are selling something. Blair just watches.

That’s what stays with me: not the subject, but the method. The patience. The refusal to flatter. That’s where the actual work is.