Kindness Left Behind
There’s a quiet, almost unnoticed kindness in the way strangers lift lost things from the cold ground and place them somewhere visible.
Not because they have to, but because someone might come back looking.
Someone might need to feel that small relief of being reunited with something they didn’t mean to lose.
In Sweden, especially during the long, dark winter months, these scenes appear often.
These everyday gestures, small and wordless, began to catch my eye
— and hold my attention.
I started taking photos of them. Not out of habit, but out of feeling.
Each one seemed to hold a quiet story, trace of someone’s presence.
A short pause in their day.
And behind every forgotten item, a human impulse: to help, to notice, to care.
Once we found a glove this way. It had fallen, unnoticed.
We picked it up, placed gently on a bench, and left it there.
That moment stayed with me...
Not long after, my girlfriend lost her glove too.
We retraced her steps, thinking back to when she had last worn it
— walking time and space backwards in our minds.
Eventually, we found it. Hanging from a tree branch beside a path, as if someone had gently paused their day to give it a chance to be found again.
It felt like something more than luck…
— a reminder that what’s lost isn’t always gone, and maybe, just maybe, that the faith in humanity isn’t either.
This project is about that feeling. The warmth in being found.
But it's also a reflection on how easily we let things slip away.
— how quick we are to replace, to waste, to forget.
That’s a feeling I carry too
— the sense that this awareness, this care,
is fading in the world around us. .
That we’re losing more than objects,
we're losing the habit of holding on.
These images are a record of that hiding tension.
Between loss and attention.
Between care and indifference.
Between letting go and looking back.
Sweden, 2024