IN THE COLD LIGHT OF DAY

Retreating from the exceptional seasonal snowfall that has swept across Europe like a canvas blanket thrown over the world by Bulgarian artist Christo, Finnish photo artists Tuomo Manninen, Milja Laurila and Saara Ekström represent a diligent breed of stalwart artists who have taken to the camera with a personal ambition and beautiful sensitivity that shines a light into the darkness of this corner of Scandinavia.

An emerging talent among her contemporaries, Milja Laurila has pursued an interest in the intentions and conditions of a photograph, from its original conception to the moment of exposure, as she engages with the apparatus of photography in order to understand personal episodes from her past. With her work On the Way Home the opportunity to photograph everything beyond her window is replaced by words that are collected onto paper as a narrative that punctuates the blankness of the sheets. Laurila recalls her history and delivers it as anecdotal sentences that run left to right just above the centre of the page, moments from an illuminated past: ‘it seems people need to comment on or put words next to a picture, literally, on the back of pictures. You can’t have them at the same time, but you can’t separate them either.’ Like a novel that reveals itself to the most intuitive part of an audience, her pieced-together entries of information introduce a series of idle observations from the past:

Addis Ababa 1975, you and your brother and your father on the beach of Africana Hotel, a lot of savannah and smoke but nothing else and Nairobi. A little bit out of focus, you loved the shirt. You wore it always and for years November 16th, I have very red nails, there were no houses like this in Dar es Salaam.

On the Way Home is a stark but very sobering work that recalls flashpoints from the artist’s life. The work of thirty-eight pages read like pictures in the sand that disappear as quickly as the tide breaks over them. At the centre of this work is her father, who, when she was much younger, took her and her family to the cultural monsoon of Tanzania, from where she recalls their life and upon their return his subsequent death.

Saara Ekström is a photo artist from a more conventional mould as she photographs still lives in the manner of the Dutch masters. Yet these illuminated compositions of flowers flourishing against artificial light and set against austere interiors make for works that capture a modern resilience that is quite staggeringly wonderful. In her series If Inside Is Let in (2006–2007) the artist has composed perfectly defined domestic scenes in which objects and furniture are laid bare.

Landing (2007) is a work that demonstrates Ekström’s will for beauty over the heavy hand of reality. The window ledge, the graffitied back wall and the cold spread of concrete suggest a location of possible violence, perhaps where a rape or murder occurred some time ago. By placing a bottle of waning flowers towards the back wall, with a warm light catching it, Ekström replaces such possible evils with a greater good. St Petersburg (2007) is another stark work that is as ambiguous as it is well composed. The flowers, the nectarine and the distinctively coloured pomegranate rest on top of and beside the blurred television set as it transmits something worthy or otherwise across the airwaves.

Another typical work from Ekström’s portfolio comes from the Necessities series (2006), a light illuminates a table of tropical stems that are threaded to a series of organic vessels, recalling the perfectly balanced compositions of Italian painter Giorgio Morandi. Like Morandi, Ekström appears to have choreographed a staggering vision of beauty with consummate ease. Another work resembling the compositional sensibilities of Morandi is A Single Charm Is Doubtful II (2008), in which Ekström has organized a series of white vessels of varying shapes and sizes. There is nothing wholly extraordinary about this work of objects illuminated by natural daylight, yet in photographing this scene Ekström acknowledges something of what has gone before as it is arranged to recall many still lifes from art history.

Tuomo Manninen has succeeded at developing a strong body of works that have a very distinctive signature. For his Me/We project, which Manninen began in early 1995, a collection of figures are organized around the lens and identified by their professions and their particular locations. Crossing continents and recalling history, Manninen appears to have made a vocation of his profession, befriending his unsuspecting audience into becoming his subjects. The allure with which they look upon him as he captures them for a moment with such ease is wholly inspiring. Manninen appears to have taken to travelling with such robustness that he might be looked upon as a travel photographer capturing reality as he witnesses it; yet such a notion might be easily misplaced because, rather than photograph the anatomy of these disparate landscapes and their inhabitants, Manninen intervenes in these cultures and their working communities, reorganizing reality as a stage from which he is able to choreograph history in the making:

“Rather than trying to steal passing moments in order to preserve authenticity, I prefer to work visibly, with full consensus of the people photographed… I personally believe that by actively posing for the lens the people seem to reveal more of themselves; on top of the ‘normal’ situation, they tend to show another layer, namely their own perception of themselves (‘the mirror pose’) and in group portraits there’s another, third layer: people’s perception of their status in the group.”

Significantly Manninen sees the series Me/We as originating in early photography and the notion of gathering around a camera for posterity. For this entire decade, Manninen has drawn together people of such diverse backgrounds, from Catholic-Vietnamese Church Goers in Recklinghausen to office workers at an open-air Law Firm in Saigon. Manninen appears to familiarize himself with his subjects as they appear reasonably at ease with one another at the moment at which they are asked to hesitate for the camera. There is great enterprise in what Manninen does because his subjects are so many that his ambition may well quickly become a rewarding vocation.