When we first met we were standing shoulder to shoulder against the gable of Nolby Elementary School. A few metres in front of us, his older brother and some of his friends stood lined up like a firing squad swinging sharpened sticks with freshly stolen apples stuck on them. The apples were slung at us with considerable speed, but we were never hit. Standing there next to him, I could feel his body flinch each time an apple smashed against the pale yellow wall behind us.

We lived in the same neighbourhood and that fall we became friends. He was a class ahead of me and was by far the bolder of the two of us. He was always the one to take the first step and I was the one who followed. He always chose a higher point to jump from. He had sex before I did, and when I was thinking about buying a moped he had already sold his.

He still lives in the town where we grew up and now he has a wife, two sons, a home in a terraced house and a steady job. The security of his life appalls and attracts me at the same time. It is difficult to point a finger at the choices (if we made any) which have determined our present lives.

I have spied on him and his family for a year now and secretly photographed them. There are over a hundred rolls of film in my archives. We have made a contract in which they have given me permission to spy on them. In other words, they know that I'm there but they don't know when.

Ulf Lundin

Somewhere in a city in the west of Sweden, near Gothenburg, a man goes about his life - he wakes up, takes the children to school, goes to work, comes back, speaks to his wife. At the weekends he breakfasts on the balcony or barbecues for friends. He appears absorbed in these daily rituals, rarely smiling. It is a perfectly uneventful family life - except for the event of it being photographed.

This man who remains anonymous is Ulf Lundin's erstwhile best friend, the boy at school whom he followed and heroised. Years later, himself temporarily impecunious, single, living in a bedsit, Lundin wonders about the man whose life has become a mirror reflection of his own, the man who seemingly has everything. The two enter into a strangely consensual game. Lundin has permission to spy as long as he is never seen. He snatches shots through his windows, from behind the bushes in his garden, or hidden in his neighhbour's house - he even follows the man on his summer holiday. The pictures accumulate.

Despite its intense voyeurism, its exhaustive record of another life, this is not a documentary work. It is less a portrait of the family than a self-portrait of the photographer. Lundin hints at one of the strange truths of the medium: that the photographer, although supposedly observing others in the world, is more often driven by the need to find his or her own image refracted back through the prism of the lens. For none are quite as self-absorbed as those who devote their time to surveilling others.

Kate Bush, Senior Programmer

Ulf Lundin was born in 1965 and currently lives and works in Stockholm.

He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Galleri Magnus Karlsson in Stockholm (1997) and Galleri Hippolyte in Helsinki (1997). This is his first exhibition in the United Kingdom.

Ulf Lundin's exhibition is supported by IASPIS, Delfina Trust Foundation and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, International Programme.

For further information on this and past exhibitions, visit our Archive and Study Room.