Elina Brotherus has established herself among the pre-eminent Finnish photographers of her generation through discrete and internally coherent bodies of work such as Suites françaises (1999) and The New Painting (2000–2004), which are conceived and executed in the finest tradition of the avant-garde photo-book. Arguably, however, by implicating her practice both in the language and traditions of art history and, to a lesser extent, in post-feminist identity politics, she has consistently raised broader questions about what it means to make photographs about (rather than simply as) works of art, questions that resonate beyond the local concerns of the Helsinki photography scene. Regardless, therefore, of the aesthetic sophistication and impressive technical quality of the prints that she produces, it is as a contemporary artist working against the grain of photography as it is narrowly defined that Brotherus’s work should be understood.

This does not mean, however, that the ways in which her practice has previously been discussed fall short of a true understanding of the work itself. Rather that two of the most obvious issues raised – the influence of painters like Jan Vermeer and Caspar David Friedrich and the apparent personal and biographical content – overshadow a deeper complexity about what it means to work in this way. The rich interweaving of form and content is particularly true of the relationship between the representation of figure and the landscape in Brotherus’s recent practice.

The idea, however, of subjecting what seems at first glance to be sensitive, personal imagery to the complex, nuanced and potentially alienating framework of historical forms and conventions has its own lineage, which runs throughout the history of art. This is best understood, perhaps, through those strange, displaced self-portraits in which artists assume the identity of historical or imaginary personae: Michelangelo as a flayed St Bartholomew, carrying his own skin, or the painter Balthus as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. The artists take on the anxieties and limitations of characters who exist only within predetermined narratives and make them their own.

In recent years too there have been some important variations of this strategy, through which women artists have sought to adopt the fantastic or contrived positions ascribed to them traditionally by their male counterparts. In the late 1990s, for example, Jemima Stehli (with whose work Brotherus claims a great affinity), restaged photographs made by Bert Stern (of Marilyn Monroe) and Helmut Newton (notably Here They Come and Self-Portrait with Wife June and Models), in which she assumed the uncomfortable position assigned by the male photographer to his female subjects. In Stehli’s important and influential work, however, the productive aspect of the process was not the duplication of a substitute version of the original image (reauthored, as it were, by a woman), but the experience of working through the demanding level of precision upon which Newton himself had insisted: it was the ability to assume that position within the process of its making that made the work.

For Brotherus too there is something of the same vital quality of ‘being in’ the image as if she were merely her own model or subject, which drives and generates the finished photographs, even when her authorial presence is substituted in some way. In the series Suites françaises, for example, the yellow Post-it notes (evidence of Brotherus’s desire to learn French, and live in France), signal the presence of the photographer whether or not the labels are attached to her body, her possessions or her friends. In some cases these ‘explanatory’ labels cover the very things to which they refer; and the way that they designate both objects and feelings further complicates their effectiveness. Arguably then, the concluding image in the series – a wall to which a great number of these little signs are attached – stands, indexically, for both the artist’s presence (as photographer) and her experience in France – doubling the ways in which she is present, despite her physical absence from the frame.

It is this ability to suggest authorial presence and absence at one and the same time, to be in and out of the frame, subsuming a personal position within a contrived, composed frame, that draws Brotherus’s emptied out landscapes – the Horizons and Very Low Horizons (all 2001) – into dialogue with the remarkable figure studies produced at the same time: Le Printemps, Femme a sa toilette and La Liseuse. But what is also remarkable is the ambition with which both categories of image, and indeed so much of Brotherus’s work, attempt to draw what is self-consciously photographic into dialogue with what is expected from the classic genres of painting: nude studies (evoking Rembrandt or Degas); interior scenes (Chardin or Vermeer); landscapes (Friedrich); or, almost unbelievably for someone whose work is predominantly self-referential, Ovidean mythology, spun either through the prism of the Italian Quattrocento or the glacial academic tradition of Bouguereau or Cabanel.

It is this final example, in which an attempt is made to inhabit an impossible position, (drawing Brotherus towards a practice like Stehli’s), that offers an insight into the complex drives and desires at stake in the work. For, to produce photographs like Baigneuse, orage montant, Baigneuse de Saturnia or Nu endormi (all 2003) is to give oneself over to, but also to reclaim, a tradition of male fantasy that, in the case of late-nineteenth-century academic painters like Cabanel, has come to be associated not only with formulaic and hackneyed pictorial conventions but also hypocritical highminded libidinousness (and here again, we might think of objections to Stehli taking Helmut Newton as the basis for her own work).

It is significant in this context that in a recent series called Artists at Work (2009), which encompasses both photography and film, Brotherus engages directly with the problematic history of the life study, the primary building block of the conventions of academic painting. Working with two young Finnish painters who studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg, Brotherus produced work in which she simultaneously occupies (or appears to occupy) the position of female model (the subject of the gazes of two male painters) and woman artist, returning and recording her own gaze from a position of authorial strength within a complex composition that contains and frames the male painters. As she puts it: “I wanted a situation where it is the model who presents herself posing as a model. Traditionally the painter watches the model and the model watches nobody. In our ‘unholy model session’ the roles get mixed: the model becomes an image-maker and the painters become models.”

The history and tradition of the academic nude, usually associated with late nineteenth-century French painting, also underpins an important Finnish tradition, one most readily associated with the painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela. Having studied in Paris, Gallen-Kallela integrated both academic and nascent modernist approaches to painting into works of subtle complexity and technical facility. His 1885 painting Model Study, for example, now at the Ateneum in Helsinki, combines two contrasting and stunning views of a dark-haired nude model, with an insert of the back of the painter’s own head facing the easel – and as such as has much to say to Brotherus’s engagement with the academic nude. Gallen-Kallela is also well known for having successfully combined two of the principal concerns of Brotherus’s recent work (landscape and the female nude), in a series of compositions based on the Kalevala, the Finnish national myth: in his 1891 triptych Väinämöinen and Aino, for example, Aino, the female character, drowns herself to escape the attentions of the wife-seeking ‘hero’. But beyond the academic conceit of a narrative that licenses the conventional licentious blend of female flesh, foliage and water, Gallen-Kallela’s concern for a conspicuously local landscape and light, and attention to a folktale, speak directly of and to the Finnish national identity: all of which suggests that in Brotherus’s work, too, these nuances must be taken into account: even, if only as a tacit negation.

To rescue anything that is as aesthetically and conceptually cool, clear and self-possessed as Brotherus’s Baigneurs from the troubled waters surrounding the Birth of Venus, (or Väinämöinen and Aino) is a rare and fugitive achievement, but one which underpins, rather than undermines, the ground on which the work is based. Baigneuse, orage montant and Baigneuse de Saturnia are remarkable, almost impossible, photographs, not because they depict impossible situations, but because Brotherus both produces and occupies them in a way that confounds the very pictorial traditions on which they are based. To make work which revolves around representations of one’s own relationships, situations and emotions without it ever collapsing into these same factors signal the fact (often lost in what historians and critics call the ‘mire of intentionality’) that this work is about making images, carefully, deliberately, systematically, which have a position on their subjects but which are never as literal or as transparent as they may appear. Placing herself in front of the camera, honestly and repeatedly, with all the compromises involved in this kind of photography – the necessity of wearing one’s own clothes, and the necessary intrusion of the shutter release cable – Brotherus poses and reposes a series of questions about what it means to produce work in any genre (be it domestic interior, landscape, or bathing nude), without relinquishing the originality, intelligence and desire of the artist.