フィンランド出身でブエノスアイレスを拠点に活動しているフォトグラファー、ヘンリック・マルムストロム（Henrik Malmström）の作品集。本書は2011年から2014年にかけて、ハンブルグに滞在していた期間に自身の部屋から見えるセント・ジョージ地区の近所をありのままに撮影した写真をまとめた一冊。土地開発や路上売春の禁止法の執行の強化に伴い、変わってゆくセント・ジョージ地区の通りの終焉を記録している。まるで監視カメラで撮られた映像のような効果を出すために敢えて安いデジタルカメラを使用し撮影された写真の細かい粒子は、今までにない抽象的な美しさを醸し出している。

Slowly but steadily we become immersed in what Henrik Malmström saw and photographed from the window of his living room. The pages of A Minor Wrongdoing unfold as a hypnotic sequence of candid shots taken at the neighbourhood of St. Georg in Hamburg, between 2011 and 2014. Hundreds of them, they record the last remains of street life in an urban area that is currently undergoing fierce gentrification after recent official law enforcement against street-based prostitution. Malmström used a cheap digital camera forcing its ISO levels to reproduce in each scene the raw effect of a surveillance cam. The grainy monochromatic material of his voyeuristic enterprise has been put together in this voluminous book replicating a messy police report archive. Printed in sharp dots, the grain adds a grade of unprecedented abstraction and beauty to the sequence whereas the quantity of images breaks with the conventional linear story structure. There is an uncanny feel in it. And obsession: the unconfessed obsession of a photographer who happened to be in the right place at the right time. We do not get to see much of what he photographed but we can still imagine pretty much happening in this obscure underworld of transactions.