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About

Maria Sandgren was born in Umeå, Sweden and lives and works in Stockholm. She has been involved in psychology all her professional life and started photography and singing jazz in recent years. 

The inspiration for her photo projects comes from personal experiences, psychology, and societal problems. She stages emotions, vulnerability, traces of human encounters, and closeness. She uses small means to achieve shifts in expression. She works in black and white and colour based on a pure and concrete visual language. 

 

Before each project, she works through an inner process in which impressions, personal experiences, and psychological science lead to a kind of mental starting point for visually representing an experience or certainty of some kind in the next step. With the physical work in front of her, the exploration continues and takes shape in more sensory impressions and expressions. 

 

A strand of performativity recurs in several of the projects: in preparation for taking a picture, by participating in the picture herself, and in how close the themes in the pictures are to her personal experiences and knowledge of psychology.

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Maria blogs about photography, creativity and psychology, see Maria Sandgren Studio on Substack. She writes about a variety of topics such as photographers, experiencing artworks, emotions, learning photography, aesthetic experiences, photography + therapy from different psychological angles. She mainly writes about the psychology of creativity and aesthetics.

Education

2024

Photographic project work,

HDK-Valand, Göteborg University,

Sweden

Photographic basic course, HDK-Valand, Göteborg University, Sweden

Photographic processes,

Gamleby Folk High School,

Sweden

Judy Weiser’s PhotoTherapy
Techniques, Photography in Therapy, Italy

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2023

Individual artistic project,

HDK-Valand, Göteborg University,

Sweden

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2015

Cert ISTDP

(affect-focused) therapist

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2005

PhD in psychology,

Stockholm University,

Sweden

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1997

Reg. psychologist,

Uppsala University,

Sweden

Activities

Business owner, psychologist in private practice, educator, artist, Psychological Forum Sweden AB

www.psykologisktforum.se

Affiliated researcher, School of Health, Care and Welfare, Mälardalen University, Sweden

www.mdu.se

 

Research interests
 

Work psychology, music psychology, and political psychology

Publications 

See my publications here

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Group exhibition
 

2024 | Graduation exhibition, Gamleby Folk High School, Studio Tabac, Stockholm

2024 | Slide show at industry days for the Swedish Association of Photographers (SFF), Fotografiska, Stockholm

 

Presentations 
 

2000-2019 | A large number of presentations at international conferences in music psychology and social psychology 

2024 | Panel discussion on artists' health, The International Artist Managers' Association (IAMA)

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