A record of a city,
one person at a time
The Portrait Archive is an ongoing photographic archive in Stockholm. It documents people, places and the present moment on Polaroid I-Type film. It is not a photo studio with a concept — it is an archive that happens to make photographs.
People
The archive begins with a person in front of a camera. No casting, no styling, no selection. Whoever sits down becomes a record with the same weight as every other record. Over time the archive becomes a portrait of a city made entirely of individuals.
Places
Each portrait carries the neighbourhood it belongs to. Södermalm, Hässelby, Årsta, Gamla Stan. The map is not decoration — it is the second subject of the work. A city is its people and the ground they stand on.
The Present
Instant film cannot be retouched, repeated or undone. One exposure, one chemical reaction, one object. What the archive holds is exactly what happened in that room, on that afternoon, in that year.
The Archive
Every Polaroid is numbered by hand, dated, catalogued and sleeved. Nothing is deleted. The archive is intended to outlast the sessions that made it, and the people who run it.
Tadeu Fidalgo
“I started photographing people because I wanted proof that a moment existed. A Polaroid is the only photograph that cannot be duplicated — it is the moment itself, held in your hand. The archive exists so that those moments are not scattered across phones and hard drives, but kept together, numbered, in one place.”
The people in the archive
Everyone photographed becomes part of the archive.
Be part of the archive