Christian Göran enchanted me with his underwater series and managed to capture moments that catapulted me into pure bliss, into a dream or fairytale. Read below his favorite story to one of his pictures and what made him become the photographer he is today. 

Who is Christian Göran? 

I bought my first camera four years ago and quickly found a way of expressing myself in this media. After about a year of digital photography I started with analog. I was born in Stockholm, Sweden. My father is Swedish. My mother is a former refugee from Chile under the dictatorship of Pinochet. Because of this, I grew up with a partly different cultural background, with different views on life, a different framework of what’s allowed and what’s not, trying to fit in to a conservative society out on the countryside. Perhaps that’s why I always had a feeling of being an outsider, trying to blend in but not quite being able to.

When I started with photography, I suddenly had a reason of being on an arm length distance from everyone else, observing instead of participating. This is part of a basic foundation to why I am the kind of photographer that I am today. Through the lens you will see through my soul on how I see things and with what feelings I look at the world around me.

What makes a good photographer?

Being present, noticing and capturing little details, things happening beneath the surface that others don’t see.

A goal that you want to achieve as a photographer …

Working with an underwater team in a nature film production is a dream I have. It’s more difficult to achieve than I first thought though.

Your first camera …

A Nikon D90

With what camera/s do you work today?

Now I work with a Canon 5D Mark II and my dad’s old Nikkormat FT from 1965.

What is important to you when taking photos?

That the surroundings inspire me and that I’m in a creative flow. Good lighting is a important ingredient in an inspiring surrounding.

Please tell us the story behind one of your photos that means something special to you…

It’s the story of when I took the picture “long seconds over Kabul”

I’m sitting a bit dazed in a cockpit at five o’clock in the morning preparing to get out of this bee’s nest of crazy traffic called Kabul airport, for a 30 minute flight to a military base in Mazar-a-Sharif to the north west over the mountains while I’m trying to get my brain to work properly after 8 hours of work when I put on my uniform in a hotel room in Turkey.

I look out over the dusty and messy airport, the grey concrete with the yellow lines and fire extinguishers strategically placed on each parking position, military helicopters with their machine guns hanging under the nose, American military private jets in their grey paintings with a US General or someone important on visit.

Suddenly the traffic freezes for a couple minutes and the the hectic talk over the radio goes quiet, when two military Black Hawk helicopters on a mission suddenly come out of nowhere and land, pics up some soldiers, take off and fly off towards the horizon before everything gets back to normal again on the airport.

I look at the choppers disappearing in the distant, take a photo of the scene and then look over the barb wired fences. On the patrolling military vehicles, barracks with bored soldiers walking around them, the big bomb detector that all the trucks going to the airport have to pass through, the bunkers and behind all of this, the silhouette of the grey city and the mountains behind it.

Wow. (That’s really all I can say here)

Christian Göran supports a wide variety of our projects with his pictures. One of them is the sponsorship of Maicol in Colombia. The project aims towards providing clean drinking water and restoring children’s rights in the community that Maicol is growing up in. 

His prints are available on Acrylic Glass, Canvas, Alu-Dibond and MOAB Fine Art Paper in his gallery on photocircle.net. Especially his underwater series works best behind the shiny acrylic glass.