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Susanna Majuri
The Water Researcher’s Daughter

Susanna Majuri
The Water Researcher’s Daughter

Waterfall, 2009 C-Print, Diasec, 100 x 142 cm

Chief Curator at the Finnish Museum of Photography Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger (AKR) interviewed the photographic artist Susanna Majuri (SM) in early 2010. Rastenberger and Majuri worked together on Majuri’s exhibition The Water Researcher’s Daughter.

AKR: It has been wonderful working with you on your new exhibition, but one effect has been that I can no longer look at your pictures without thinking of your personality. Although you say you get ideas for your photographs from fairy tales, stories and music, it seems to me that in your pictures you construct a kind of image gallery of your own life. Where people once used to think that the feelings we see in photographs are specifically the feelings of the person being photographed, it now seems to me that in your works you use the camera to trace out your own feelings.

SM: That’s right. My pictures are fiction, in the same way as people tell stories about their lives, or a text is revised to create a better text. And when I make references to the various stories behind my images, what I want to do is, as it were, to step in to tell people about the ingredients from which my picture arose. Such as: do you remember this great track by PJ Harvey? Or, have you read the Icelandic author Vigdís Grímsdóttir’s stories? Or, I hope you notice this! These are characters from Grimm’s fairy tales! But the fiction should have something in it for my own reality to engage with. I don’t necessarily want to talk about the real backgrounds to the pictures, I tell a simpler version, i.e. a fairy tale. I can’t tell people about the real things.

AKR: It seems to me that your pictures influence your life.

SM: [laughs] I have always fallen for my latest picture, I adore it and love it, and I am terribly nice to it. But, at some point, our relationship is over, and I need a new picture. That sounds just like I am using them. For example, I was really fond of Elskar Fyr (High Tide) and of Saviour. I kept them close to me. And, nowadays, my feelings towards them are a bit like meeting an ex-lover… I even behave that way when I see them.

AKR: That sounds a bit like W.J.T. Mitchell, who wrote that pictures have minds of their own, and their own desires. Pictures make people behave as though they wanted them to act in certain ways.

SM: Exactly… Once I have made, for example, Saviour, I no longer see myself in the work, but rather the way the picture tells me to think.

AKR: As you said, you sometimes appear in your own pictures, for instance in the one you just mentioned, Saviour, but you don’t make a big thing out of it. So your pictures are not self-portraits in the traditional sense.

SM: I am not interested in making self portraits. But it’s true that I appear in lots of my pictures, for example, in Salme, Waterfall and Mykines. I am the invisible child in Mykines. (In Majuri’s Mykines a white figure vanishes into or emerges out of whiteness depending on the amount of attention and tenderness she receives, just like the invisible child in Tove Jansson’s story.) Occasionally, I want to try out for myself the role that the picture portrays. But I don’t emphasize this, since it doesn’t have a lot to do with the final pictures. I myself play a role in my photograph, but I am primarily the director of the picture.

You Iceland

AKR: Since you were fourteen, you have been an Iceland fan and interested in both Icelandic music and literature. Why?

SM: My best friend, who I had really fallen for when I was young, read Vigdís Grímsdóttir, so I began to read her, too. After that, there was no going back. When I was sixteen, I went to Iceland for the first time. It felt amazing, since it was like I was recognizing familiar places: what on earth is this, was I born here? Afterwards, I have thought that the only explanation is that I had watched documentaries about the Icelandic band Sugarcubes so many times. And Iceland was hard to forget: I spent ten years longing to go there. In 2005, I managed to get there on a residency, and then I really took a lot of photographs. My whole series You Nordic, which includes, for instance, Iskaldur Modur, Gudrun, Nousu Rising and Salme, came about thanks to my time there.

AKR: It sounds to me now like the photographs you have taken in the other Nordic countries are pale reflections of Iceland, or are they?

SM: Precisely, I have copied Iceland. I didn’t dare tell anyone about that when I was studying at the University of Art and Design. I was afraid they would think I was childish if I told them I was totally Iceland mad! That’s why, to fool them, I went to take photographs in the other Nordic countries. So You Nordic is a hoax, I fake the idea that it also says something about the other Nordic countries [laughs]. Well, it’s not quite like that. Over the course of time, it became You Nordic because I am from Finland and I do seem to recognize living people in the other Nordic countries. Or at least I wonder whether we have some of the same things? Do we have a common language? Can we communicate with each other?

AKR: Talking about language seems significant with regard to your pictures. Your pictures, if anything, as it were, illustrate stories or your own life, they are translations from one language to another. I find it interesting that you yourself often talk about how important the titles of your pictures and the versions in different languages are. What are you aiming at when you direct viewers’ interpretations by giving your works titles in different languages?

SM: The different language translations of the pictures open up different responses to the pictures, or offer different points of entry into the pictures. It feels the same as if you were interpreting a poem or a song. I love language. When you look for translations, it feels like lots of things are there simultaneously, no and yes at the same time.

Nobody Asked for a Change

AKR: How do you see your own works in relation to other Finnish photographic art or the Helsinki School?

SM: I don’t really see a connection, it may be that I’m too close. My pictures are terribly personal, and nobody could tell me how they’re supposed to be made. They are childish. I personally get a terrible amount of enjoyment out of the way that in a picture a little speck of light can be glimpsed through a flock of birds, or a line on a tree is the same colour as the model’s dress. But being part of the Helsinki School has taught me a great deal. I have learnt about editions of photographs and got to meet art collectors. On one occasion, a potential buyer took me to stand in front of Saviour and asked: ‘What were you thinking about when you made this?’ My heart started pounding because I had been told he was interested in buying my work. I replied spontaneously that the figure in the work is on the way to rescue something. He replied, ‘Good, that is important.’ I nodded. Then he said to me: ‘D’you know what I think? I think the figure is diving under the water to build a house for her family.’ I replied that that is important, too. Then he said: ‘Good, I’ll take this one.’

AKR: So, interpretation and good business came together there.

SM: I guess so, and besides, I have learnt that an artist cannot take on many galleries, you have to say no. They don’t teach you that sort of thing in school. Or that a gallerist needs money for showing a picture. That means I can no longer show pictures from an edition that is completely sold out because the gallerist can’t sell them.

AKR: The artist gets into a conflicting situation there: on the one hand, she has to keep her own recognizable style, and yet, on the other hand, to constantly innovate and produce new works. Is this linked with the fact that in your latest photographs, in which the figures move around in underwater landscapes, you have used a totally new way of taking pictures? You have had enormous wax cloths up to six-metres wide made out of pictures that you have found, and submerged them to the bottom of a swimming pool. Your models dive down in front of the cloth in the water.

SM: Nobody asked for a change, just the opposite. I myself needed a change. The problems began after Elskar Fyr. It got such a lot of attention that some people teased me, saying, you will be a prisoner of that picture for the rest of your life. You’ll never get over it. I began to feel like I was the Finnish duck painter Kaj Stenvall. I felt like I was supposed to do what Susanna Majuri is supposed to do. Gone/Mennyt is an image of how I began to daydream about photographing people from closer to. The water distorted people’s faces and made the surface like brushstrokes… a little as if I were the painter Mari Sunna and could maybe paint a strange, slightly frightening human figure. I always doubt myself. But that doubt has to be overcome.

Boy-girl, Girl-boy

AKR: It is mostly girls that appear in your works. And you specifically want to call the figures in your works girls, not women. Being called a girl is often a sore point for us women because it alludes to the status of women as beings who are subordinate to the men who call them girls. Why do you want to talk about girls and not women?

SM: Perhaps I am stuck in childhood, and perhaps I am afraid of being a woman and of the expectations that are placed on women. In my childhood religious education, it was clear that the man is the head of the family and that the women have lower status…

AKR: …and as long as you are a girl, you don’t need to take the woman’s place.

SM: Exactly, I’m not going to take the woman’s place! Besides, a girl is a bit like a boy, the difference between a boy and a girl is not all that big…

AKR: …while a woman and a boy are from quite different planets. A really long way apart.

SM: I need the freedom, boy-girl, girl-boy are almost interchangeable.

AKR: I think that in your water pictures you have used water as an element that both protects and also reveals the various relationships between the girls: sisterhood, friendship and also erotic love. Some of your pictures are very erotic, and appeal to women’s – and I’m sure also men’s – desiring gaze. What do you think?

SM: I have always hoped that people would say that because I myself see my pictures as erotic. Then I start thinking, what if I am behaving grossly towards the people I photograph? What am I really doing to my models? And what do I make my pictures for? But then I reassure myself by saying that, after all, this is visual art and fiction.

AKR: Would it be true to say that the girls in the fictions in your pictures can do the things that you can’t?

SM: Yes, yes, that’s precisely it. The figures in the pictures get to live the life they want. The girls get to have adventures as the mood takes them.

AKR: The girls in your photographs get to be both the heroines of the tale and sexual beings…?

SM: …or at least get to a point where they know what they want to be.

AKR: The eroticism of your pictures has not really been talked about publicly. It seems to me that artists have to come out as homosexual artists or lesbian artists in order to be able to talk about eroticism between girls. Especially if they say that the pictures are personal. Or what do you think?

SM: When I was young I got grounded for having a girlfriend. But I was brought up to speak the truth, since if you don’t speak the truth, you go to hell.

Artist: Susanna Majuri is a photo artist who lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. She is a graduate of Turku Arts Academy and the University of Art and Design Helsinki. Majuri’s is represented by Galerie Adler of New York and Frankfurt. Her works have frequently been shown in New York, USA, Japan and across Europe and exhibitions of the University of Art and Design Helsinki’s The Helsinki School group.

Writer: Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger works as the Chief Curator at the Finnish Museum of Photography. Her PhD study in progress focuses on discourses of the internationalisation of Finnish contemporary photographic art. Previously Rastenberger has worked as the editor-in-chief of KUVA, a Finnish magazine of visual culture. She has also been employed by Helsinki City Art Museum,The Finnish National Gallery and worked as a free-lance lecturer and art critic.