Dreaming is Heavy Metal

Grace Ahlbom's Dreaming is Heavy Metal reworks the imagery of Norwegian black metal fandom into a set of staged photographs, made after a chance visit to a record shop shrine to the scene's 1990s originators.

Ahlbom found the basement of Helvete, a Norwegian record store, converted into a memorial to the bands that formed there decades earlier, its walls covered in records, T-shirts, and photo-shoot props. Not a fan of the music herself, she approached the subculture as an outsider drawn to its devotion, painting the faces of two of her regular subjects in corpse paint and photographing them moving through crowds near London tourist sites. The resulting square-backed softcover, designed by Ben Ganz, was published by Soft Opening in 2018 in an edition of 300 and shown first at the gallery's unusual home inside Piccadilly Circus Underground Station.

Ahlbom, a New York-based photographer who often works with subcultures and their rituals of belonging, has trained her camera on skaters, black metal devotees, and pop idols alike, treating fandom itself as a subject worth close observation.