Artist or commercial photographer? Why I don't choose

For years I kept two folders on my computer. One was client work: lipsticks, serums, snacks, and launches. The other was "personal", which really meant "things I made at midnight because I couldn't stop thinking about them". I treated them as two separate lives. These days I show them side by side, on the same website, in the same portfolio. Here's why.

What's actually different

Commercial work starts with someone else's question. A brand needs a launch image, a set of reels, a campaign. There's a brief, a deadline, a budget, and a product that has to look its best. My job is to solve their problem beautifully, and the result belongs to their story, not mine.

Art starts with my own question. Still Good, Still Life began with discounted grocery bags: why do we decide some food is worth less because of how it looks? Foreign Object started with a tomato and a feeling I couldn't name about living in Sweden as a Filipino. Nobody asked me to make those. Nobody tells me when they're finished. The only brief is to be honest.

The audience is different too. A client wants people to buy something. A gallery visitor isn't buying anything. They're being asked to slow down and think.

What's exactly the same

The tools. The light. The table. The way I put a lemon next to a fish, or a fork into a tomato. My art and my commercial work are made with the same hands, the same props, and often the same colours. The skills I built shooting beauty products for big brands, like controlling reflections or making a drip land just right, are the same skills I use to make a still life feel tense or tender.

How the art makes the client work better

Making art keeps my eye fresh. When I photograph a vegetable for an exhibition with the same care I'd give a luxury serum, I learn new ways to light, compose, and tell a story with objects. Those ideas come back into client shoots. Brands get sets that feel surprising because they were tested somewhere with no rules.

It also keeps me honest about why I do this. Commercial work can slowly flatten you if it's all you do. Art is where I remember that I like making pictures, not just delivering files.

How the client work makes the art better

Commercial photography taught me discipline: plan the shot, build the set, solve problems fast, and finish. It taught me that a picture has to work in half a second. That's useful in a gallery window too, where people are walking past and you have one glance to catch them. My exhibition at the Chalmersgatan street window was basically a scroll-stopping problem in real life.

So which one am I?

Both. I'm a product photographer and set stylist who also exhibits, and an artist who also makes content for brands. I don't think brands should be scared of that. If anything, an artist's eye is exactly what makes commercial content stand out.

If you're a brand who likes what you see in the portfolio, art and all, say hej. And if you're a curator, the exhibitions are right here.