SCENES AND SETTINGS
– Architectural Photographs with Human Beings (and Some Animals)…
Museum of Cultures, Helsinki, Finland, 2009
Bailey Exhibition Hall, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA. 2010
Alvar Aalto Museum, Jyväskylä, Finland. 2011
In architectural photographs people are scarce. Buildings are examined as pristine forms and compositions; a living creature behaving unpredictably has no place in this genre.
To me, architectural significance manifests itself in a different manner. It’s all about situations: it’s about the experience of corporeality, it’s about mental reactions to the sensory realities of space and materiality, to the presence of one’s self and fellow human beings. Architecture is someone sitting on his or her front steps, peeking out a window, hesitating on a staircase. The mediating space between one’s own nest and the outside world determines the true quality of architecture.Within this encounter – the simultaneity of intensity, intimacy and dignity – also resides the possibility of beauty.
My pictures are also encounters. More often than not, they are based on eye contact and a silent agreement with the subject being photographed – I have never considered the classical street photographer’s hunter mentality my own. For me the ‘decisive moment’ is not the click of the shutter, but the nod of approval that precedes it. From the perspective of those being photographed, I am just another Western tourist, intruding with his camera, with obscure intentions; the subjects’ goodwill is a prerequisite for the entire photographic event.
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The exhibition’s photographs were taken on my trips in Asia made during a period of ten years or so, added with a few taken recently in West Africa. I have gravitated towards places where age-old building types are still a natural part of the daily habitat, and people are at one with their surroundings. Building techniques refined over thousands of years have evolved on the terms of local – often limited – resources, in consequence of different natural conditions. These buildings are family members to their inhabitants and they are lived in as if they were sacred places; people have built their vision of the world in their homes.The population explosion, global homogenisation and the merciless laws of the monetary economy are rapidly destroying the spectrum of this built human phenomenon.The diversity of building cultures is narrowing, in the same way as biodiversity, and at the same time disappears the fundamentally similar ‘feeling at home’ that people living in these vastly differing environments exude.
My pictures’ viewpoint is perhaps idealistic, romantic and overly aesthetic.The choice is conscious – the imagery of alienation and ugliness already has enough interpreters.
Naturally the authentic experience of architecture cannot be conveyed by photographic means, but some traces of a momentary presence – slices of a moment – can be captured in an image. From these pieces, like toy building blocks of a sort, I assemble my own mental landscape and worldview.
Welcome to my world.
