Trek by Jerome Berglund

When I first got sober close to a decade ago, then later after I moved back to Minnesota from California with what little I could carry and stuff into my rust-buckety old Mazda, which still somehow continues running to this day, I found all of a sudden that I had no interest in photographing people any longer. While I rarely reconsider this resolution, I inevitably am reminded why I made it in the first place those many years back. Needing solitude and meditation to reflect and cobble my life back together, I began to simultaneously obsessively document my wanders, first through the meanest streets in Los Angeles and later about the strange, overgrown primeval wilds and rustic frontiers of rural Minnesota. There was something relaxing and therapeutic about these jaunts, but it was also at times an exciting challenge, a scavenger hunt to see what arcane wonders the fates had placed in my path were I shrewd and observant enough to ferret them out and deft enough to capture them for posterity. The town I have resided in for many years now, where my father was born and raised in a house his dad built himself from an army mess hall, has become my central subject, and the character I find myself most interested in pursuing and exploring, in these strange exile adult years of arrested development, want and disappointment. There are many mysteries I have stumbled upon, and countless more I trust still await. Walk beside me for a spell, and I hope you similarly enjoy a few glimpses at random, of the rough yet curiously picturesque place three generations of Berglunds have lived, worked, and called home with some small measure of pride—despite the sudden influx of roundabouts which have been causing residents no end of distress and confoundment in recent months, which I can only hope we will all get used to at long last, as I find one does with anything, after enough time has elapsed.

Jerome Berglund graduated from the cinema-television production program at the University of Southern California, and has spent much of his career working in television and photography. His work has been featured prominently in many journals, including gracing the cover of the most recent issue of pacificREVIEW. His pictures have further been published and awarded in local papers, and in 2019 he staged an exhibition in the Twin Cities area which included a residency of several months at a local community center. A selection of his black-and-white fine art photographs was showcased at the Pause Gallery in New York over last winter’s holiday season, and his fashion photography is currently on display at the BG Gallery in Santa Monica.