Moving through an imaginary city, Metropolia invites readers on a dreamlike wander punctuated by enigmatic encounters. Urban space is perceived in fragments, its silhouettes only partially discerned. Mist, enlarged grain, sometimes saturated light, shades of grey and near-monochromatic colours playing with cool blues or warm oranges shape Bogren's sensitive visual experience. For the first time, he uses colour photographs to punctuate black and white. “Using colour was a way of rebelling against myself,” he explains in the book's interview, “to see whether I could do something entirely new. With black and white, I began to know too much about what I was doing, whereas colour was like a foreign language I gradually learned. In truth, though, my colour images are very monochromatic.”

Capturing intimacy, expressing fragility and revealing impermanence, Martin Bogren's visual world exposes the world's illusion. His images hold a dissolving reality on their surface, caught discreetly at the last possible moment.