ROBERT HELLSTRÖM
One of the world’s best music photographers
By: Mats Alfredsson | June, 2022
The place is the Get Away Rock Festival in Gävle, Sweden.
A magical silence has descended over the festival grounds. The thousands of hard-rockers in the public wait with bated breath for the next act.
It is a few, long seconds that bring forth goose-bumps!
Then the first note from the bass from the Gothenburg band At The Gates explodes and the whole festival area is filled with a primal roar!
– One of my most powerful mental kicks, ever! A rush of adrenalin that cannot compare. The power from the stage, from the crowd. And that I was there, right in it, between the public and the band. It was a moment that one hundred percent explains why I enjoy this job so much.
‘Robert’s journey has only just begun, but what a start’
I meet up with Robert Hellström in a small authentic feeling café on Storgatan, in his home town of Herrljunga, the railway nexus that is known to many for having been where the law caught up with the infamous career criminal Clark Olofsson who gave us the “Stockholm Syndrome”.
An event that fades into the mists of time in comparison with what Robert creates these days.
He’s been honored by being declared as one of the world’s 100 best music photographers and the journey has only started.
I ask him why he has chosen to be a photographer:
– For the same reason that my musician friends play music. To shoot is like breathing. Something I can’t be without. It is the only time when I can be myself. It is when I’m alive.
But it hasn’t always been so. His road to success has been strewn with depression and anxiety, mainly during the school years. It was then that he discovered that every problem disappeared when he had a camera in his hand.
‘With the camera in my hand, everything boring seizes to exist’
