Jeppe Wikström

Jeppe Olof Wikström (born 10 April 1963) is a Swedish book publisher and one of the country’s best known and most published photographers. He has some 20 titles to his credit and combined sales exceeding 500,000 copies (April 2011). He is the initiator of several of Scandinavia’s largest photographic projects and the winner of several awards for excellence in photography. He is also part owner of the publishing house Bokförlaget Max Ström in Stockholm.

Wikström was project manager in 2009 for Peace! 100 Voices against Violence and War (Swedish: Fred! 100 röster mot våld och krig), which focused on educating young people about alternatives to violence between individuals and nations alike. The initiative coordinated a series of public school events and raised funding to produce a book that was distributed free of charge to all Swedish 16-year-olds.

He is co-founder of Expressions of Humankind Foundation and the director of the global photo project A Day in the World, where people all over the world took pictures of their everyday life on the same day.

Jeppe Wikström was born and raised in Stockholm, the son of (in Swedish), a politician who served as Minister for Culture in the Swedish government from 1976 to 1982. Later, he became the Governor of Uppsala Province.

Wikström sold his first photograph at the age of 12 to the weekly magazine Svensk Veckotidning, and by 14 was an apprentice staff photographer at the Stockholm daily newspaper Expressen.

Wikström fulfilled his compulsory military service in 1982-83 as a journalist with the armed forces newspaper Värnpliktsnytt. In 1986 he founded the image agency Skärgårdsbild, focussing on nature photography and the Stockholm archipelago. He started a sister company Äventyrsbild in 1989 to specialize in travel and adventure photography. The two agencies were acquired in 1991 by Pressens Bild, where Wikström became marketing director for the combined company. In this capacity, he has led the production of more than 150 photography books published by Max Ström.

Together with Marika Stolpe, Wikström founded the publishing house Bokförlaget Max Ström in 1991, where he now works full-time as publisher.

In 2007, Wikström was awarded the (in Swedish) by the City of Stockholm for, as the citation read, “his meticulous and buoyant depictions of the capital city in photographs.”

In 2010, Wikström was honored by Sweden’s Princess Christina “for his contributions to building bridges between culture and the business community.”

For their work with Peace! 100 Voices against Violence and War, Jeppe Wikström and writer Saam Kapadia shared the Eldh-Ekblad Peace Prize in 2010, the 50th anniversary of the award given annually by the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society.

In 2012 he was by awarded with the Bellman Price by the City of Stockholm for his ”dedicated commitment to the art of photography”.

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Wikipedia