Welcome to a conversation with Louise Wolthers and MC Coble about their artist’s book Things Change Anyway, which won the Swedish Photobook Prize 2024.

The artist’s book Things Change Anyway is a collaboration between the non-binary, trans* artist MC Coble and art/photo historian Louise Wolthers about different types of metamorphoses in life, the body, relationships, and nature. The book consists primarily of photographs from the couple’s own image archive, which spans over a decade and is presented in radical, non-linear editing. Through the flow of images, there are five essays by Wolthers and twelve montage drawings by Coble.

Things Change Anyway explores the significance of photography, gazes, and being seen. Some photographs document Coble’s ongoing gender-affirming transition, another theme is Wolthers’ challenges with menopause. There are also still lifes and snapshots from everyday life – with all its vulnerability, imperfection, and transience. The image strings are woven together to form a dynamic montage over time and space that reflects what change, queer kinship, and non-human connection can look like.

Wolthers’ personal essays contextualize individual images with a broader photo history and gender/queer/trans* theory. Coble’s drawings form a visual, non-linear diary and synthesize different experiences – from depression and life during COVID, about being put on pause by the system and different ways to change, as well as regaining one’s agency.

Things Change Anyway (192 pages) is a co-publication between the Swedish publisher Breadfield Press and the Danish publisher * [asterisk].

MC Coble (they/them) seeks to make visible the hidden/ignored histories and contemporary urgencies of marginalized communities, informed in part, by their own experiences as a non-binary trans* artist, activist and educator. Photography, performance art, video and recently drawing form a material foundation for their critical and intersectional approach to thinking along with queer & trans* feminist politics, investigating the power of play and the potential of failure as methods. Coble currently has a two year working grant from the Swedish Arts Council.

Louise Wolthers (she/her) is an art historian, Head of Research and Curator at The Hasselblad Foundation. She conducts research in photographic history and contemporary practices, often in collaboration with Gothenburg University, and is currently working on the curatorial project Photography and the Glitch (2022-2025). Wolthers publishes widely on photography, contemporary art and visual culture in books, surveys, and academic journals. Most recently she has curated the exhibition Inuuteq Storch: Rise of the Sunken Sun for the Danish pavilion at the Venice Art Biennial 2024.

The conversation is a collaboration between the Center for Photography, the Photo Authors within the Swedish Photographers’ Association, and Ulricehamn Library.