Torsten Kjellstrand, an Assistant Professor of Practice at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication, has been a photojournalist and writer for over 25 years, and has more recently taken up filmmaking. Torsten took time out of his busy schedule to talk to me about his immigration from Sweden and his life-long affinity for nature and the outdoors.

How did you end up moving from Sweden to the United States?

I was only nine when we moved to this country. So I came because my parents came. They’re adventurers- they came to Minnesota in part because they wanted to go canoeing in the vast wilderness between the Minnesota-Canadian border and Hudson Bay. They thought of it as an interesting adventure. I lived in Minnesota through college.

Do you prefer the United States to Sweden? Which one is home to you?

There’s a part of me that will always feel like Sweden is home. There’s a deep groove I fall into kind of emotionally and just the way I think when I go back home to Sweden that I can’t replicate here. That said, I have become very American over the decades. So I don’t completely fit in in Sweden either. We spend as much of our summers as we can in northern Minnesota in a little cabin that we own there on the edge of the wilderness, and that is probably the place that I feel the most at home in North America.

How do you feel when you’re outside in the wilderness?

When I’m outside by myself or with people I’m comfortable around, it’s when I feel the most like myself. When I’m in the woods or in wide open spaces too, really anywhere that feels like the natural world, that’s when I feel like my most instinctive skills, the skills that I’m best at because of who I am and not what I’ve learned are most at play. Of course I wasn’t born learning how to build fires, but that just feels like that just grows out a deeper part of me and how I grew up.

By how you grew up, do you mean because your parents were wilderness people?

Yeah, we spent a lot of time outside. And I used to skip a lot of school to go hang out in the woods. We lived in the suburbs, the real suburbs with shopping malls and all the horrific stuff. I did have a strong sense that I wanted to escape all the time. I spent a lot of time and energy escaping, either physically by leaving and going to places I felt more comfortable with, or just psychologically by reading adventure stuff. Either stories about people who spent time outside or reading about how to build snow caves or how to rope up if you were going to climb a mountain in the winter, silliness like that.

How do you think that translates into your life today?

I’m still escaping, it’s what I do. When I have time, I do not go to the movies. I sure as hell don’t go shopping in shopping malls. If there is a hell I’m convinced that its a shopping mall with not enough ventilation with video games in the background.

With such a strong affinity for nature, did you ever consider being a nature photographer as opposed to the work with ethnic and minority people you do now?

That’s actually kind of how I got my start in photography. My father and I would go into the woods together and make photographs of roots and rocks and critters. And then later as I got a little older, we would go hunt in the fall, which was just an excuse to get outside. And so was photography, it was just an excuse to go to beautiful places and try to make a few pictures. The pictures weren’t really the point until much later. I do sometimes wonder why I didn’t make that my living, but part of it is I still think of the United States as an exotic place. I haven’t been everywhere in the world, but I think we are the strangest collection of cultures I’ve ever been around. And it’s stunning the number of different ways people find to make their life work, and to find meaning in their place on the planet. And I’m really interested in that.