John Alinder, the son of a farmer, was born in 1878 in the village of Sävasta, in the parish of Altuna, in a province of south-eastern Sweden, and stayed in his village all his life. He chose not to take over his parents' farm, becoming instead a photographer and an odd-job man; for a time he ran a country shop from his home, and even an illegal bar. From the 1910s to the 1930s he made portraits of the inhabitants around him, in the yard, against a sheet or a wall, in a body of work that stayed unknown until his glass plates were rediscovered.