Recently, I read a quite remarkable book, Pankaj Mishra’s “The Age of Anger”. In it Mishra traces the many forms of anger we see erupt in today’s societies back to the fight between enlightenment and romanticism. The book has many interesting aspects and Mishra is an extremely well-informed writer so I can recommend the book.
What’s however missing there is somehow an explanation of what anger actually is.
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The term “abstract” has this interesting double meaning as denoting pure shape and form (“abstract art”) but also as a summary (of e.g. a scientific article).
I rarely undertake to make abstract pictures. But seemingly they are all around me and somehow I come back from many shoots in nature with at least a few pictures one could call abstract. Hm, I am taking pictures without intention. What’s going on here?
(more…)After a summer full of distractions (mainly in form of sun and heat), I finally got around to start a new photography project. In the course of that projet I went up to central-east Finland, a landscape that is at the heart of national romanticism (think Kalevala) and the birth of Finland as a nation.
My first stop was at a skiing resort that had just closed for the summer golf season and not yet opened for the winter season. Staying there already gave the illusion of yourself being the only living thing around – like being transported into an alternative reality that only consists of water, mountains and silence.
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The world is going to pieces and people like [Ansel] Adams and [Edward] Weston are photographing rocks!
Henri Cartier-Bresson
You know why the beetles and buttercups so please you?
It is because you do not know the human soul, you do not see the stars!
Friedrich Hebbel
There is no denying: we humans love drama. Every nature documentary needs some of it. Will the young duckling survive? Will the antelope escape the lions? Mostly, however, we love drama involving ourselves. That might be a reason why artists, filmmakers and writers have and still do produce so much works about war. War as the ultimate human drama. Both quotes above were written at times of war. The Cartier-Bresson quote is from the time of WWII and Hebbel wrote at the dawn of the German Revolution of 1848.
Both quotes also sharply criticize artists that in such times of human drama do not pick up on this drama but continue to make nature the theme of their work. To me the criticism seems to be that such nature-artists don’t get their priorities straight. Is this right? Is there an implicit supremacy of human affairs over nature? There is an answer to that.
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“I have a dream…”
Martin Luther King
Some called him the most boring writer in German literature, others called him the best novelist of the 19th century. Some found him an idealist reactionary, for others he was a visionary and early ecologist and feminist. Strangely, all these judgements have some justification.
The list of his admirers goes from Nietzsche to Thomas Mann and W.H.Auden but his work is as good as unknown outside the German-speaking world. For me, his work was one of the strongest influences on everything I am and do.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of his death. Time to remember a tragic great man: Adalbert Stifter.
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“And although my eyes were open
They might just as well have been closed.”Keith Reid, Procul Harum, A Whiter Shade of Pale
In 1967 a bunch of young men in their early twenties released their first single. The song on the A-side became an enduring success and is now one of the most played and sold pop songs of all time. This year, the song was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the list of superlative acclaim is long. In a way, like few other songs, A Whiter Shade of Pale has become part of our cultural fabric. I wonder how such a thing happens. Especially, if the song has such opaque lyrics – or have you heard of the Fandango before?
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Täällä Ainolassa tämä hiljaisuus puhuu.
(Here in Ainola the silence speaks.)Jean Sibelius
Composition in visual art has many elements of which I have written here from time to time. Within these elements, space plays a prominent and still narrowly defined role. Mostly, it is discussed as negative space, that is space which surrounds, isolates, contrasts, and highlights a subject. As negative space, space has a supporting role and is not part of the subject matter. In my work I have become, however, more and more interested in space as part of the subject matter. I would call this type of space active or energetic space. And yes, I know, this needs explaining…
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Recently, I spent a few days at the west coast of Sweden. Again, I found it amazing how the coast lines in the Nordic countries can be so similar and so strikingly different at the same time. There in Bohuslän the archipelago was shallow but the outer coastline and the islands were almost free of any vegetation. Now major tourist destinations, the little villages and towns along the coast earlier had been fishing communities. Then, beginning in the 1840s the local granite, valued for its durability, became a major commodity and a whole quarry industry developed. Now, this industry has mostly disappeared but it has left many scars in the landscape.
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Usually, when we take up a pursuit, we are led by a certain interest. When I took up photography in earnest, I was driven by a desire to capture the “transparency” of Finnish nature. With transparency I mean how light was able to flood the Finnish landscape in a way very different from more Southern parts of Europe.
With time, however, my interest started to shift to more abstract themes connected to nature in general. Such themes are the relation between space and light in general, but also mood, change and meaning in nature. In a way, my work has become more of a hunt for the non-obvious or hidden dimensions in landscapes.
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And I’m far far away with my head up in the clouds
And I’m far far away with my feet down in the crowdsSlade, Far Far Away, 1974
Lately I noticed that more of my work drifts towards the romantic side of interpretations of nature. I wonder, is this a reason to worry? Romanticism is one of the most abused concepts in the history of ideas – and the ambiguity of the word “romantic” in the first sentence already hints at how much a term can be cursed by its transformative uses (beautiful and romantic share that fate).
What worries me even more is: am I getting trendy?
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