Early on he felt he did not belong in his mother's house, in school, in heterosexuality, or in the land of grey rock. A young man travels out into the world — to Florence, Paris, Mallorca, Seville and New York. It is the 1950s, only a few years after the war's end, and Italy and Spain are worn and poor, as in the films of neorealism. The draughtsman and writer Claes Bäckström (1927–2015) photographed with an artist's eye, without 'artistic' rhetoric but with the quiet poetry of plain matter-of-factness. He saw people, streets, bridges, the brazen vitality in the gaze and gestures of street boys. They are photos in modest formats, contact-printed back then in tobacco shops in Florence and Paris. And he wrote about the urge to travel: decisive episodes carved out with a light hand, moving between childhood memories, places and unexpected encounters — be it the boxer Joe Walcott, the bullfighter Domínguín, or J.R. The cautious light of the future in the post-war years. Time fled, time regained. / Peter Cornell