Folklig Idrott

Folklig Idrott (Folk-athletic games) gathers Maximilian Stejskal's mid-century photographs of traditional Swedish-Finnish rural sport, images made for an ethnographic study and republished decades later as a body of documentary photography in their own right.

Stejskal's black-and-white photographs recorded wrestling, stone-lifting, tug-of-war and other rural games practiced among Swedish-speaking communities in Finland, originally compiled for a 1954 folklore study published by the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland. In 2016, editors Marie-Isabel Vogel and Alain Rappaport returned to Stejskal's negatives, publishing this 120-page edition through Edition Patrick Frey that presents the photographs on their own terms, separated from the original academic apparatus and allowed to read as formally direct, unsentimental documents of bodies at work and at play.

Little is documented about Stejskal beyond this project; his photographs survive largely through the folklore archive they were made to serve. Their republication situates his field photography alongside Edition Patrick Frey's broader interest in vernacular and archival image-making, work produced outside any art context that later reads as such.