Elinor Westin

Ellinor, was a very productive and keen photographer who passed away in in 2008. She was born in Thailand to a Thai mother and an American soldier on leave from the Vietnam War in 1971. She was placed in an orphanage and later adopted by a Swedish family.

At 19 she started to document herself, as well as her social and geographical surroundings. She continued with this practice up until she died in 2008 after 4 years of living with breast cancer. Her work is an interesting narrative of origins, identity, belonging and context reflected in daily banalities as well as spectacular events with a variable but unusual sense of credibility.

Her interest in these themes make itself apparent in her simple expressive self-portraits which she put side by side with her observant street photography and plain but dreamy landscape photography. As Elinor got older the explicit pronunciation in her visual language softened.

At the time of the being diagnosed with cancer, shortly after her only son was born, her tendency to the theatrical in the self-portraits had been replaced by a more compassionate and mature registering gaze. It is the combination of Ellinor’s younger more egocentric gaze and the calmer more considering gaze that she used later to keep on documenting her self and the world around her which makes her work so incredibly strong, brutally honest and yet comforting at the same time.