Over the six years of working on Sweet Balloons, photographer Hans-Olav Forsang went through a period of serious, life-threatening illness. How does one’s view of the world change, and how is that reflected in the images after confronting the real fear of losing one’s life? How do you capture the world around you in a situation where ordinary life has collapsed and, in a sense, you have to understand life all over again?
 
Sweet Balloons takes a personal approach, in which the nature of the work is to reproduce the world around us through small, everyday abstractions of simple and familiar things such as people, birds, dogs, trees, stones, landscapes, water, and sky. The images are subtle yet transformative, most often studies in stillness that exude mystery, beauty, and sometimes danger, scenes that can appear unreal despite the tangible nature of their subjects. The photographer draws on his background and experience as a documentary photographer, but here works under freer conditions.
 
The photographs in this book were taken between 2018 and 2024.