Rikard Österlund

Rikard Österlund is a Swedish photographer, book designer and workshop facilitator based in Rochester, UK. He grew up in Norrköping, Sweden, and has lived around Rochester since 2001. After completing a BA in Photography in 2004, he developed a practice spanning long-term personal projects, portraiture, historical photographic processes, editorial commissions and photobook design. His autobiographical work explores belonging and rootlessness, identity, solitude and empathy, and the effect of invisible illness on intimate relationships.

Österlund works across a deliberately broad range of photographic forms, from hand-made tintypes and wet plate collodion to digital cameras and iPhone photographs. His photobook Look, I'm Wearing All the Colours (2018) is an intimate account of a relationship lived with invisible illness as a third presence. The book won the Belfast Photo Festival photobook award in 2019 and was exhibited in the photobook programme at Athens Photo Festival. He also photographed Billy Childish's painting studio over six years for Man in the Mouth of a Cave (2018), a 120-page publication containing more than 80 photographs; an image from the series was selected for Portrait of Britain 2018. His clients and collaborators have included Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, Ralph Steadman and Billy Childish, and his photographs have appeared in publications including The Guardian, Harper's Bazaar, Juxtapoz and Q.

Österlund has exhibited nationally and internationally, taught photography, and delivered talks, demonstrations and workshops in the UK, Sweden, Egypt and South Africa. He co-founded Hulkes Lane Darkroom & Studio and has organised Rochester Photobook Club since 2016, helping build a wider local photography community. For Art on the Delta, Österlund presents work developed with Zara Carpenter during their year-long residency in the Cathedral's King's Orchard Gardens. The project combines sustained photographic observation with print and gathered material, tracing the garden's seasonal rhythms and the relationship between landscape, architecture and human attention.

Check out his website here: https://www.rikard.co.uk/