Ismo Kajander: Miss France, 1998

‘Paris traverse la pensée comme une encyclopédie de la vie, où l’on découvre des passages, des cours intérieures, des ruelles et des autoroutes, toujours plus surprenants. La ville ne se vide ni n’abandonne jamais, n’accorde ni ne refuse.’

‘Paris permeates your mind like an encyclopaedia of life in which you will incessantly discover astonishing new passages, courtyards, alleys and avenues. It will never either run empty or surrender, it won’t admit or refuse.’

L’air de Paris / Pariisin tuoksu (‘Air of Paris’, Musta Taide, 2009) is an elegant little book that features artwork by Ismo Kajander and texts by Anna Kortelainen relating to the mother city of all artists.

Kajander (born 1939), whose art includes photographs, drawings, installations and mixed-media artwork, has taken a serious interest in Paris for the past 50 years.

Anna Kortelainen is a writer, researcher and a third-generation Francophile whose short, philosophical texts on the city of dreams and memories alternate in the book with images of Kajander’s art.

Ismo Kajander: Hôtel de Buci, 1972

The book has been designed and edited by Tuomo-Juhani Vuorenmaa, Editor-in-Chief of Musta Taide publishing company, and graphic designer Jorma Hinkka (a former Art Director of Books from Finland), himself a seasoned Francophile.

In 1961 Kajander discovered le nouveau Réalisme in Paris, and was inspired to work with assemblages commenting on social issues. The reception of this work in Finland was not particularly enthusiastic at the time, but this did not prevent the artist from dedicating himself to the genre.

Kajander now lives in Paris part-time; according to his wish, his ashes will be strewn over the Seine.

The wolf's hour? An abandoned house is alive...

Extracts from Viimeiset vieraat. Elämää autiotaloissa [The last visitors. Life in abandoned houses, Maahenki, 2010] by Kai Fagerström, Risto Rasa & Heikki Willamo. Text by Willamo, poems by Rasa, photographs by Fagerström and Willamo

Some thirty years later I found the badgers’ cottage again – it wasn’t the same one, but the mood of my childhood still floated there. Grey walls and a shingle roof, bare gaping windows, the door creaking on its single hinge. Oak tree in the yard, lilacs flourishing wild. The forest was rapidly reclaiming its own behind the cottage. The mounds of sand beside the wall bases showed prints of strong-clawed paws and a number of paths, hardened from use, led into the woods.

I wandered about the yard, looked at the cottage and peeked in the windows. The grey panelling was pretty and at the same time free of unnecessary ornamentation. In the front hall were shoes now decades out of style, in the main room a partially collapsed fireplace, a rusty stove and a stool missing a leg. Between the forest and the house were berry bushes and a few apple trees just barely clinging to life. In front, a hillside field facing south.

I sat in the yard under the great birch tree to await evening. I felt again the tingle of excitement of my childhood evenings in the cottage’s enchanted garden, but now the feeling was seasoned with nostalgia. It was a longing for that innocent time and at the same time for a world that was gone. The foundation stones of our lives are set at an early age and we carry those foundations through the years. Home leaves tracks within us just as do things and events experienced strongly. As adults we see the world through tinted glasses and somewhere deep within we long for the world of our childhood.

Photo: Fagerström & Willamo

At least in that early evening moment I longed for the warm summers, butterfly-filled meadows, cows in the pasture and sand beneath my bare feet. I longed for that total immersion in the world of adventures, which only a child knows how to achieve. Here and now, and let the rest of the world disappear.

I waited. The sun set and twilight deepened. A blackbird sang. At last the pale figure of a badger appeared on the mound under the window. It perched there for a moment, then reversed back under the house. Soon it emerged onto the mound again and shuffled along the path into the woods. Nothing else happened. A lone badger was living in the cottage. Thirty years earlier I would have imagined it the surly master of the house; now it was a badger. I felt wistful. I felt I had lost something irreplaceable.

I went to the cottage on several evenings and the pattern repeated. The badger sniffed the wind and withdrew into its den, to reappear shortly. Then it disappeared on its night expeditions. The only variation was which of the two paths it chose.

During those evenings, something new began to form in the depths of my mind; curiosity replaced nostalgia. Well-built houses remain from one generation to the next. The world changes around them and in the end they are abandoned. They begin to be called abandoned houses, but they are not abandoned. Without upkeep, their fate becomes decay. When the roof finally gives, water does its part and the house collapses.

The old badger did not live to see his cottage collapse. I found him next to the road, killed by a car. He was resting on his side, his paws as if frozen mid-step. I touched one of them. The pads were coarse from walking and digging, the claws, long and sharp, the teeth shone like a string of white pearls. I carried his body into the forest and placed it beneath a small spruce.

The place was briefly without inhabitants, but in the spring a large family could be found within its shelter, a raccoon dog couple and about a dozen pups. The bustle called to mind the time when the cottage was filled with children’s voices, but the new residents were of today. The raccoon dog is an immigrant from far, the east, and it has a bad name in certain circles, as immigrants always have in certain circles. But as so often, this matter didn’t deserve much fuss, either.

Photo: Fagerström & Willamo

In the Finnish countryside the raccoon dog is more of a beggar than a predator. Raccoon dogs busy about at dusk looking for voles, frogs, large insects and larvae. Sometimes they eat the eggs of bird’s nests they happen upon. They like berries and sneak into yards to snitch fallen fruit. They scout the roadsides, risking their lives in hope of road kill, and hang around barn corners. The raccoon dog has all the markings of a versatile bon viveur, but winter is a nearly unsurpassable barrier for it. Only one pup in ten lives to the age of one year, and of this dozen only one or two will see the following spring.

The raccoon dogs brought needed life to the cottage. White clouds of burnet roses bloomed in the doorway and even the tumble-down building seemed to hold itself more erect. It did not take a lot of imagination to see echoes of the cottage’s past in the animals’ bustling – children peeking through the crack of a door, grandma squinting benevolently through the window. The raccoon dog pup sitting in front of the deserted doghouse even recalled the family’s spitz at the start of its life.

Early in July the raccoon dogs moved away. In the autumn another badger appeared, beginning to stock the cottage for its winter quarters. The next spring he sometimes had a friend but there were no baby badgers to be seen. The old geezer continued his solitary life.

The cottage fell into decay. The roof leaked in a number of spots and finally gave. The owners carried away the best logs; the rest sank into a pile overrun with willowherb and raspberry bushes, and fox cubs growing up nearby briefly made the tangle into their fort.

A red cottage stands on a small hill. Seen from afar it appears in good shape there among the bushes, but closer up one sees the boarded windows and rotted steps. The people have gone. Along the walls are mounds of sand with hard-trodden paths leading from them. One runs directly into the apple orchard, another, along the ditch to the lakeside field, but the most well-worn leads under the leafy canopy of the hazelnut grove to a lair dug into the hillside.

Photo: Fagerström & Willamo

I peek in through the window. Inside it looks lived in. People have left their mark: wrinkled rag rugs, things on the table and on the edge of the toppled fireplace. Toys and tops of cooking pots strewn across the floor, a torn bag in the corner. As for the current occupants, sand and dry hay, chewed items and the path under the stove tell of them.

The cottage is being used by badgers. They have another home in the woods beneath the hazel bushes….

The badger clan lives in the red cottage like in the best of fables. They have tables and chairs, rugs on the floors and a rocking chair in the corner. They probably don’t use them, but who’s to say. Anything can happen in the dark. I imagine the clan’s oldest gathering the young about him on a floor cushioned with rugs in a corner of the main room, telling them animal stories and fables. Calmly, without hurry, in badger language. He would use people in his tales – just allegorically, in place of animals.

People and badgers have different requirements for the home. While the badgers live there they redo it; they dig up the foundations and tear open the floors, hastening the building’s decay. Might the failing of this cottage’s bearing wall also be the doing of the badger clan? They have dug up the ground beneath it and caused it to fall sideways and in so doing opened a passage into the main room.

Photo: Fagerström & Willamo

Through the badgers’ activity the house has moved into nature’s realm. After a short vacant period it again holds life, but the direction is inevitable.

The wood rots, the insulation decomposes, even the roofing felt turns brittle and crumbles. The cement cracks, the iron rusts. The glass defies time, but even that gets buried under the forest litter, shatters as frost churns the ground’s surface, and ultimately crumbles into tiny particles, like quartz sand.

Nature is reclaiming her own. After a moment on loan, the place is returning to the great cycle.

Translated by Jill G. Timbers

Natural landscapes? According to Metsähallitus, the government body charged with forestry, ‘the regeneration area is defined according to topography, in accordance with the landscape. Retention trees and groups of trees are always left standing in regeneration areas to enhance the landscape and to improve the survival chances of species that require old and decaying trees.’

Ritva Kovalainen & Sanni Seppo
Metsänhoidollisia toimenpiteitä
[Silvicultural operations]
Helsinki: Hiilinielu tuotanto ja Miellotar, 2009. 200 p., ill.
ISBN 978-952-99113-4-9
€ 43

Finns have a strong identity as forest people, partly because more than 95 per cent of them still speak an ancient hunter-gatherer language, Finnish, as their mother tongue. In spite of this cultural and historical background, Finland has become the world’s most eager and influential proponent of forestry models based on clear-cutting – felling all the trees in a particular area at one go and planting new trees to replace them.

In most parts of the world traditional forestry, practices have tended to emphasise selective logging, methods in which only some of the trees are removed at the same time. During the past four decades Finnish companies have often led the attack on such traditional forest management. Finland has produced the world’s largest forest consultancy company, Jaakko Pöyry, and some of the major paper and pulp corporations. Finnish companies manufacturing tree harvesters and the machinery for pulp and paper factories have also been world market leaders.

Three times round the globe: he road network built for forest harvesting is the densest in the world

The Finnish model of forestry has been hailed as an economic success story, but it has also caused large-scale devastation of natural forests and huge greenhouse gas emissions from forests, forest soils and peatlands in many different parts of the world, from Finland to Brazil and Indonesia.

Why have Finns, an ancient forest people, been so eager to export clear-cutting to other parts of the world?

The photographers Sanni Seppo and Ritva Kovalainen have produced two remarkable books tracing the roots of this strange paradox.

Puiden kansa (in English, Tree people, 1997; published also in German and Japanese), was an investigation of what we can still find out of the almost totally disappeared, ancient Finno-Ugric cultures, in which sacred trees and sacred forests played a prominent role.

Puiden kansa presented a number of intriguing and forgotten historical anecdotes. A thousand years ago, each Finnish household probably had its own sacrificial tree, and each village had a hiisi, a sacred burial forest. In 1228 the Pope of Rome gave an order to fell the sacred trees and forests of Finland. In spite of widespread resistance, the sacred forests were replaced by Christian churches, except in some parts of East Karelia and Northern Russia. Even in Finland some of the old sacrificial trees of individual households are still standing.

Roads for harvesters: 1200 square kilometres of land is trapped under 125,000 kilometres of road, permanently diminishing the forest area and preventing the forest from functioning as a carbon sink

Metsänhoidollisia toimenpiteitä (‘Silvicultural operations’, 2009), can be seen as a sequel to Puiden kansa. It describes how Finland’s present forestry-industrial complex was created, how the model was forced on the Finnish people, and how it has affected the lives of ordinary Finns at the grass-root level.

Finland was not occupied by the Soviet Union in the Second World War, and during the Cold War it was never a part of the Eastern Block. However, the organisational models that were adopted for the Finnish forestry sector after the Second World War should only have existed on the Soviet side of the border. As Sanni Seppo and Ritva Kovalainen point out, Finland’s forest-owners’ associations were organised by the state, but not to become free actors or genuine citizens’ interest groups. They were integrated into the state administration and controlled by it.

The Finnish state and the pulp and paper industries formed a tight alliance to push through a monolithic model of forestry, which had zero tolerance for dissenting opinion or alternative models. In practice the Finnish forest owners lost almost all control of how their own forests were to be managed. Everybody was forced to adopt the same practices, forest management procedures which were designed to guarantee an adequate supply of wood for the pulp and paper industries. The forest was first thinned to produce pulp wood and then finally clear-cut to produce pulp wood and timber.

Wilderness untouched: forester Jarno Hämäläinen has protected the five hectares of forest he inherited. ‘This is forest growing naturally, untouched by a human hand. This is a place of my own where I return to look for my roots, to listen to the humming of pine trees and the whining of mosquitoes.’

Forest owners who did not agree to clear-cut their forests were harshly punished by the authorities, and accused of ‘destroying their forests’ (!). This was, admittedly, an exceptional procedure in a Western democracy, but it did happen, and the stories included in Seppo and Kovalainen’s book reflect a clear and logical pattern. Seppo and Kovalainen have included an illuminating quote by one of the main architects of Finland’s new forestry policies, according to which ‘we would not have been as successful, if we hadn’t used an almost paramilitary organisation in the forestry sector’.

Puiden kansa was an optimistic book, a book full of hope. It concentrated on the small but wonderful fragments of the ancient world that still remain. This is one of the reasons the book has become so beloved by so many people in Finland. Metsänhoidollisia toimenpiteitä, on the other hand, is mainly about sadness and silent, repressed anger. Each square kilometre of an old forest consists of hundreds of different ‘places’, innumerable small spaces protected by the surrounding trees. When the forest is clear-cut, this rich mosaic of closed spaces disappears from the river of time, never to be regained within a human lifetime. A clear-cut forest becomes only one place, and often not a very attractive one.

Taken away: Irma spent her childhood roaming in forests which are no more

Clear-cutting an old forest always is a small, localised end of the world for the people who live nearby and who used to love the forest as it was.

Through their pictures, Sanni Seppo and Ritva Kovalainen show what once was, and what remained after the logging. They show the people and the bright, hard grief shining on their faces. Moreover, they let the people speak and tell how it made them feel.

All the stories are different, but there are elements which are repeated, over and over again. First the fear that something is going to happen to the forest. A crucifying feeling of helplessness. Impotent anger. Shock, denial, depression, anxiety. Silent questioning of whether all the hatred is justified.

Seppo and Kovalainen’s writing is dense, sharp, deep. The words hit mercilessly, straight at the heart of painful, festering sores and complex dilemmas.

But it is still the photographs that really make the book. Statistics can lie, words can lie, even some photographs can lie, but if you see this collection, you will know in your heart that what you see is the truth about the matter, or at least an important part of the truth.

Check-up by a district nurse: from the exhibition ‘Everyday life in Finland’ (Muonio, 1970)

Photographs from Caj Bremer. Valokuvaaja / Photographer / Fotograf (Musta Taide, 2010; graphic design by Jorma Hinkka)

The period after the Second World War and before the age of television was the golden age of photojournals such as Life, Look and Paris Match. The big Finnish illustrated periodical was Viikkosanomat (‘The weekly news’); its early star, Caj Bremer, was one of the first Finnish press photographers to wander among people and record life as it was

‘Every photograph is the sum of aesthetic choices, and each one has a relationship with reality both when it is taken and in the time frame in which the viewer encounters it’, writes news editor and curator Riitta Raatikainen in her introduction to Caj Bremer. Valokuvaaja / Photographer / Fotograf.

Caj Bremer (born 1929) worked for years as a press photographer, most intensively between 1950 and 1970. A retrospective exhibition of his work over six decades opened at Helsinki’s Ateneum Art Museum in February (until 16 May).

Bremer’s photojournalistic scale is large; he has witnessed war and its victims, strikes and devastation, but he also has a sharp eye for important moments in ordinary people’s ordinary lives.

‘In post-war France, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau and Willy Ronis became leading names in humanist photography. While philosophers withdrew to consider the issues of existentialism, photographers set out amidst the bustle of of life,’ writes Raatikainen. It was an idea whose time had come. The New York Museum of Modern Art’s 1955 exhibition, The Family of Man, in which worldwide photographs were grouped around common human themes such as love, children and death, is perhaps the most emblematic and well-known example of the approach. Meanwhile, in faraway Finland, Bremer’s project and exhibition entitled Everyday life in Finland (1972) recorded life that he knew was to disappear, in small villages yet untouched by modernisation.

Life ceased publication in 1972, Viikkosanomat in 1975. Reportage did not die, though. Caj Bremer has been influential in many ways in Finnish photography since, but perhaps his monochromatic view of the world of the 1950s is what lives on most vividly.

Self-evidently, the photographer likes people – he has a delicious sense of humour, too. In pictures taken at funerals or weddings, of fashion models, artists, presidents or children, in Finland or abroad, it’s the people that matter most.

The time frame in which we now view the faces Bremer has captured makes us marvel at how they, silently, speak volumes.

Curious crowds: a Roma family wedding, of Kalle Hagert and Tuula Saarto, at Helsinki Cathedral, 1959

Last rites: the funeral of 15 young people who died in a boating accident in Juuka, northern Karelia, 1959

Posing: street sweeper and model, fashion photography for Salon Ika (1958); opera singer Martti Talvela (1935–1989) enjoying a sauna in Anttola on Lake Saimaa (1985)

Country cavalcade: Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson of the United States in northern Finland, 1957

Bear and bare: President Urho Kekkonen inspects the guard of honour on a visit to Great Britain, 1961

A little night music: Teemu Kupiainen playing in Baddi, India, as the sun sets. Photo: Stefan Bremer (2009)

It was viola player Teemu Kupiainen‘s desire to play Bach on the streets that took him to Dharamsala, Paris, Chengdu, Tetouan and Lourdes. Bach makes him feel he is in the right place at the right time – and playing Bach can be appreciated equally by educated westerners, goatherds, monkeys and street children, he claims. In these extracts from his book Viulun-soittaja kadulla (‘Fiddler on the route’, Teos, 2010; photographs by Stefan Bremer) he describes his trip to northern India in 2004.

In 2002 I was awarded a state artist’s grant lasting two years. My plan was to perform Bach’s music on the streets in a variety of different cultural settings. My grant awoke amusement in musical circles around the world: ‘So, you really do have the Ministry of Silly Walks in Finland?’ a lot of people asked me, in reference to Monty Python.

In 2002 the first trip during my grant period took me to France, Spain and Portugal, where I performed in small villages in the mountains. When, on the outskirts of a small French village, I plucked up the courage to perform all of Bach’s violin sonatas and partitas from memory for the first time, my one and only listener was clearly enthralled. This I deduced from the way in which it kept jangling the bell tied around its neck throughout the duration of my two-hour performance. As soon as I began to play, this lonely cow came up to me and did not walk off at any point. I thought of this as a good omen.

In autumn 2003 I travelled to China, and from there I continued to India, then Morocco. Finally, I made a less adventurous trip to Lourdes in France. Of course, there were plenty of shorter trips in between these, but on those trips I didn’t keep a diary.

For me, playing on the streets is not about background music; these are concerts – in fact, they are almost more than concerts. I often play for a single listener or just a handful of listeners at a time. As an experience, this is far more intimate than a normal concert, more challenging, and with that comes a greater sense of responsibility. Often, particularly at the beginning of my trips, I can be very nervous as I step out into the street, and sometimes, as the first people stop to listen, I have had some sort of blackout and been unable to remember how the music continues. Such a thing hasn’t happened to me in a concert hall for years. For this reason, I practice a lot on these trips, at least as much as I would when preparing for a ‘normal’ concert.

In addition to playing on the streets, these trips involved another one of my passions: Johann Sebastian Bach and his suites for violoncello and his sonatas and partitas for violin. All of these works can be played on the viola. Only a viola player can set himself the challenge of playing every one of Bach’s suites, sonatas and partitas from memory in a single concert. Only a megalomaniacal viola player, that is….

January 19, 2004, Shimla, India

No matter how badly you sleep in a dingy, mouldy hotel room, waking up as the sun rises and seeing the summit of the Himalayas from your window more than compensates. Three hours’ morning practice on the violin sonatas. Yoga. Then out on to the street.

The centre of the old town is built on a steep ridge. On top of The Ridge there is a street, at the end of which is a market square with a church at one side. Bach and a church! I set up nearby. I feel nervous – not about my own ability, but because of the potential indifference.

An hour’s set turns into a two-hour set. Throughout there are a couple of dozen people standing around, listening intently. Between every movement someone always wants to chat. ‘Where are you from? What is your good name, Sir?’

I have to start playing the movements very attacca, without a break. Four reporters turn up, each with their own photographers. One national newspaper and three local ones, who all claim to be the largest in the region.

And the questions! ‘Shimla is the gateway to God. How do you feel this when you are playing? How does your music explain the mysteries of the universe? What is your aim in life and can you achieve it by playing? How does your music affect you as an individual? What about society as a whole?’

The most challenging exam of my life. Puzzling. People get straight to the point here; they don’t feel the need to warm up with empty chitchat. These questions make me think hard. Will this trip provide me with answers?

During the Sixth Suite a young man with a mouth organ sits down next to me and starts playing along with Bach’s harmonic progressions: G major, D major. When I finish, he begins to play some local melodies. I accompany him: C major, G major.

Lunch. I have decided to become a vegetarian for the rest of the trip. This is the easiest solution all round, and besides, vegetarian food here is very good. During my students years in Cologne I think I was a vegetarian for two years, because vegetarian food there was cheap. I could do it in Finland too, if finding good vegetarian food were as easy as it is here.

After lunch I go for a walk. I continue up The Ridge. A warm hillside. I see four eagles; one of them is circling barely 50 metres from where I stand. The city of the temple of the monkey god is full of monkeys. The eagles presumably fly up here from further across the mountains for a meal of roast monkey. I sit down to watch the flight of the eagles and start playing. I try to play in a way that mirrors the contours of the eagles’ flight: long lines, allowing the music to carry my thoughts, just as the eagle rests on the mass of warm, buoyant air.

There are never many listeners at any one time. Having said that, almost every other passer-by stops to listen for a moment, some for rather longer. During the Fifth Suite the sun goes behind a cloud; it turns cold and even the eagles disappear. Still, I manage to get to the end of the Sixth Suite without going into a tailspin, though I can’t help getting the sense that this is something of a forced landing….

A careful approach: Hanuman temple, Shimla. Photo: Stefan Bremer (2009)

January 22, Dharamsala

Slept for twelve hours! Three hours of practice, then yoga. I go to visit another masseur. In fact, I tried to reach this Tibetan-Chinese acupuncture masseur yesterday, but he wasn’t in. This time I go to make an appointment and am shown straight on to the massage table. Thumbs start kneading my buttocks.

‘Does this hurt?’ Yes, it hurts.

‘And here? What, it doesn’t hurt? What about here?’ Yes, it hurts.

The doctor convinces me to let him use one small needle. I manage not to faint. I try to think of it as a mosquito – after all, I let them bite me and eat in peace. After the procedure I feel much better, but maybe I’m just happy at overcoming my fear of needles and surviving the jab.

Later that afternoon I go back to the church. A young Irish couple is sitting outside. We chat for a while. All of a sudden the girl starts to laugh: ‘You must be the Finnish musician!’

The couple has already been in the village for a month taking part in a reiki healing course. That morning the girl opened a newspaper for the first time in a month, the national English-language newspaper The Times. It featured a photograph taken in Shimla showing me playing to street children. A short article said that I was travelling through the mountains. The girl said she’d thought that it would be nice to meet me. And now here she stands, giggling, and says that life is like a Kieślowski film.

Living in the local area there are four Christian families and a priest. An elderly gentleman standing outside gives me permission to play in the church. He says that the priest will be arriving soon. I play for half an hour for the Irish couple and the odd tourist.

The priest arrives. He quizzes me about what happened the day before. ‘Between four and five o’clock? Oh, so the door was open? You didn’t see anyone?’ Long pauses between each question.

Then: ‘Listen. Someone broke in here yesterday: our collection box was stolen. The window was smashed in. The big chain on the door was broken and that’s where they got away with the collection box. Don’t tell anyone you were here yesterday or you’ll be talking to the police for goodness knows how long.’

Okay! Got the point.

Then we agree that I will play in the church every day between three and five. Everyone is welcome to come and listen.

A little more playing followed by a yoga course for beginners – disappointing. Even the preliminary positions are so complicated that it will take years of practice for me to get into them.

Tibetan food.

Apparently the Dalai Lama arrived here this morning. Every now and then he gives public lectures in English. Suddenly the lights go out. My Tikka head lamp – what a marvellous purchase! These mountain storms are strange. The temperature is hovering around zero but there’s still plenty of thunder. The curtains billow in the gusts of wind, though the windows are shut. We won’t run out of air. It feels good to be here.

January 23,  Dharamsala

It’s early afternoon; I’m shivering beneath the blankets. The electricity comes on and off. Outside it’s sleeting. Still I managed to get in three and a half hours’ practice this morning. As I was practicing, I realised that in my imaginary practice session early that morning I had been playing some wrong notes. My pitching was a bit sketchy.

After practicing I do some yoga to warm up. Instead of doing the two-hour walk I have planned, I crawl back to bed. If only it would clear up. The kilometre-and-a-half walk to the church really doesn’t appeal.

It brightens up just before three o’clock! Clothes on then straight to the church. The snowline is 50 metres up the hill from where I am staying. 200 metres before the church it starts raining hailstones. I run to the church. Ten minutes’ warm-up. Eventually my hands are warm enough that I dare to start playing. Of course, there is no heating inside the church and the doors are always wide open.

My playing is almost going well. My audience consists of the priest, who is busy sweeping the yard, and a woman washing the floor. During the last piece, at the most difficult part of the fugue in the Third Sonata, the first outside listener arrives. Almost immediately I lose my concentration, so much so that I can’t get to the end of the fugue. After about ten attempts and a lot of fumbling around, I finally finish the movement on the wrong chord. Deeply embarrassing. Thankfully the final two movements seem to go smoothly enough. When you’re that ashamed, at least you don’t feel the cold. Before playing tomorrow, practice the fugues ten times!

I get a gig – as a photographer. The priest asks me to come back to the church the next morning to take photographs of a visiting bishop.

That evening I take my viola with me to dinner. There are people at two other tables in the restaurant. They ask me to play. We chat. At one table is an Indian reporter with Reuters, at the other the Tibetan reporter for an American company. In only a few days in India I’ve met more reporters than in the last ten years in Finland! The Tibetan wants to do an interview. I ask to see the questions in advance, because I know we’ll end up talking about politics. Now isn’t the time for silly jokes.

The next day I will see a student. A 17-year-old local boy had heard someone playing the violin and had liked it so much he had got himself a violin. To his disappointment, he so far hasn’t been able to get a note out of it. He may be even more disappointed once he does get a note out of it.

January 24, Dharamsala

The boy isn’t disappointed at all. The violin is terrible. It takes me half an hour just to put the strings in the right place across the bridge and the nut. Then I show him how to lift his hands, how to use the weight; how to hold the instrument and the bow. I try to explain what it should feel like.

Ten minutes later the boy can play a two-octave G major scale in tune, then A major; easy nursery rhymes; half an hour later even Frère Jacques. Soon our lesson is over.

By far the most talented beginner I’ve ever met. He says he has played the guitar, but even so! I could have taken photographs of the position of his hands and used them as teaching material. Tomorrow the boy and his friends are going to play me some local Tibetan music….

Bach makes kids wild: schoolchildren in Delhi. Photo: Stefan Bremer (2009)

January 25, Dharamsala

This morning I walk up as far as the snowline; it’s now at an altitude of about a couple of kilometres. The sun is just rising. Utterly still. From the other side of the valley I can hear the sounds of a religious mass. I find a sunny opening in the hillside forest and start to play. Three pine martens and four long-tailed parrots come to watch. The sun warms me and the air is fresh. Two such glorious mornings in a row!

About two hundred metres beneath me there is a road, about a hundred or so passers-by every hour. Almost all of them stop and turn their heads in bewilderment. Where is that music coming from? This instrument certainly has a very powerful sound; all you need is a decent concert hall.

More treatment for my sciatic nerve. The Tibetan acupuncture masseur I visited before gives me five needles in the buttocks and one in the neck. It’s ridiculous to be so scared of it, but I’m scared nonetheless.

I give an interview to the Tibetan reporter. As I suspected, every question has a political edge to it. He promises to send a draft of the article to my email so I can check it through.

Then more street playing in the same spot as yesterday. An old monk listens to almost the entire set, using his cane to shoo away curious people stopping in cars or on their motorbikes. Another person to stop is a Canadian convert. He moved here six months earlier after selling all of his possessions, including a large collection of Bach recordings. He knows all the Suites. He almost starts to cry with joy upon hearing his favourite music for the first time in months. He thanks my teachers. I join him in thanks.

That evening, back at the hostel in the cultural institute, my student who has just got his hands on a violin plays at least five different instruments – that must explain why he is such a quick learner. The hostel is home to 35 artists, all of whom can sing and act and play several instruments. On top of all that, my student still wants to learn to play the violin!

Tomorrow is Indian Independence Day. The festivities have already begun. In the distance I can hear the pounding of a bass.

January 26, Dharamsala

This morning I pack my things and pay my hotel bill: 19 euros for five days including hot water, heating and laundry. Then it’s out into the streets.

With the exception of my first day in Shimla, I’ve been playing with my viola case closed. There are plenty of people who need money here – far more, in fact, than in the poorest areas of China that I’ve ever visited. But this time I decide to play next to the beggars with my case open. I have made myself a little sign: For milk powder and rice. Thank you.

I play two of the Suites. Only one person stops to listen. Then some traders come out and shoo me off their patch. Is it because of my sign, or is it just one of those days?

I go back to make corrections to the interview by the Tibetan reporter. Sitting at the computer time flies past, and I forget that I have an appointment to keep. I have promised an earnest-looking shoeshine boy that today, the day I was to leave, I will meet him at twelve o’clock and buy some milk powder and rice for him and his younger sister.

I arrive sixteen minutes late. The boy is nowhere to be seen. Every day he has looked me up and asked: ‘Promise?’ I always reply: ‘Promise.’ And after all that, I don’t turn up.

I wait for the boy until one o’clock. He doesn’t show up. I give three beggar women the money I have reserved for milk powder and rice. What a mistake! I should have waited until I was about to get on the bus. Groups of beggars run up to me as though they have some kind of telepathic connection, pulling at my clothes and hanging from my limbs. And the women, to whom I gave the money, think it was not nearly enough: one of them tries to snatch all of the money from my wallet.

I dash into a nearby restaurant and don’t come out until the alley looks empty. But the beggars are still waiting. The flock gathers again in under a minute. I escape outside the village. Only once I reach the temple do the most determined of them finally give up.

I walk up to the clearing I found before. Again I see an eagle soaring overhead. I sit down to warm myself in the sunshine. I am reminded of someone I was at school with for twelve years. After she died she appeared in my dreams and introduced me to an eagle. ‘The eagle is your friend now; it will show you the way.’

Then there is the shoeshine boy. I gave him a solemn promise to show up. This ten-year-old boy, who has double-checked this important matter with me many times over, only waited a minute or so at our meeting place. He was clearly unable to take the disappointment of being let down by the rich tourist. And now he’s gone… I feel awful.

There are lots of elderly Tibetans on the path. Almost all of them give me an encouraging smile. Some mime playing the violin. When one of them finally asks me to play, I simply have to start. I feel drained. No Bach this time. Finnish classics, popular songs. Then some film themes. Modern Times, The Sound of Music and such like. I only play whenever I see people walking towards me along the path. Gradually I start to feel better.

After a while, my Canadian music-lover friend appears and says he has been looking for me all over. I’ve promised to play somewhere that afternoon. I play the Preludes from the First, Fourth and Sixth Suites. He says he prefers them played on the viola as opposed to on the cello. My emotional barometer rises immediately. I ask if I can have that comment that in writing.

I then play the Chaconne, which my listener doesn’t know. Before beginning, I encourage him to sit down in a comfortable position; the piece lasts around fifteen minutes. Once I have finished, he says: ‘It couldn’t have been that long. You only just started.’

After that I play Itsy Bitsy Spider to two children, who run off giggling. I’ve been playing for two hours. As I close my case, two eagles fly past, one behind the other, barely twenty metres from where I am standing. Perhaps one of them is the eagle my school friend showed me.

The sun is setting. I sit down in the bushes, by the side of a dusty path. I don’t dare go back to the village before dark. It is 5.45 in the evening. My bus leaves at seven. I start to pack up my things. In an hour, not a single person has walked past me.

I am just about to set off down the path towards the village, when the shoeshine boy appears at the bottom of the hillside with two of his friends. He walks up to me and looks at me gravely. I look back. Neither of us says a word. I dig a bundle of notes from my pocket and give them to him. The boy doesn’t look to see how much is there, but puts the money in his pocket and thanks me.

We walk back to the village together. As we part, the boy looks me in the eyes and says: ‘If you back, many small shoes.’ I look back at him and say: ‘Promise.’

Kieślowski or Kaurismäki?

My bus is leaving soon.

Translated by David Hackston

Diem Hy and her trademark curls

When you step outside your office, what do you see? Not the streets and buildings, although photographing them could be an interesting project too, especially when you live and work in a city as self-consciously monumental as Helsinki. No; we’re talking about the shifting landscape of people and their clothes, as documented in the primarily photographic website Hel Looks.

A ‘hobby project’ by Liisa Jokinen and Sampo Karjalainen, Hel Looks documents fashion in the streets and clubs of Helsinki. It’s self-consciously a fashion project – in addition to documenting Finnish looks, Jokinen and Karjalainen want to ‘encourage people to dress and create their own styles… to promote emerging Finnish designers… because we like fashion, clothing, young people and photography.’

For us, though, the stories the pictures tell are more fascinating. Each entry shows one or two people. usually photographed in the street, accompanied by a brief quote from the subject. Some simply roll-call the designers they’re wearing, which may be interesting for the fashion pack but not so interesting for the rest of us. But others offer self-analyses that could, at the very least, furnish the beginnings of a short story. Diem Hy, 17, for example, is shown  in jeans and a second-hand leather jacket: ‘My hair is my trade mark. I’m not sure if I could live without my curls’; Simo, 18, likes ‘all clothes that date from before 1992’, Buster, 18, dresses in his grandfather’s clothes and likes to think ‘that I can dress old-fashioned but keep my mind fresh.’ Tiia, 22, simply ‘likes the colour blue’ (and indeed is dressed in nothing else). The range of selves, and self-presentations, is endless. Any authors in search of a character can simply apply here.

Tähtiyöt
[Starry nights]
Helsinki: Maahenki, 2009. 84 p., ill.
ISBN 978-952-5652-75-8
€ 41, hardback

Jorma Luhta (born 1951) is an award-winning Finnish nature photographer and author. The subject material of this book is night-time in the forests of northern Finland, illuminated by the stars and the Northern Lights. The problem of light pollution means that even in sparsely populated Lapland the lights from population centres can hamper the view over a radius of two hundred kilometres. Jorma Luhta’s photographs are the result of many years of dogged effort. The most impressive images of all were taken on the coldest night in a century: temperatures fell to around –50 °C. It takes split-second precision to achieve the greatest shots, such as when Luhta’s camera records a sheet of Aurora Borealis resembling Picasso’s white dove of peace (above). In his lyrical text Luhta, a night-time walker in the woods, observes his natural surroundings and contemplates such matters as his fear of the dark and feelings of isolation.

News photos document dramatic, dangerous or tragic incidents – but the photojournalist Markus Jokela is interested in documenting ordinary, domestic and everyday life, be it in Iraq, Russia, Biafra or Sri Lanka. These photographs, with commentaries, are taken from his new book, Jotain on tapahtunut / Something happened (2009), offering glimpses of life in contemporary Finland and in the United States

I’ve never been particularly enthusiastic about individual news photos, especially about taking them.

A good news photo has to state things bluntly and it has to be quite simple in visual terms. It must open up immediately to the viewer.

But the images in photo reportages do not have to scream simplified truths. They can whisper and ask, and open up gradually. One can come back to them. The reportage is something personal. Though a poor medium for telling about the complex facts of the world, it can provide experiences that survive.

Finland 1990–

If we look at Finland from an aeroplane, we see an uninhabited land, where someone has cleared the forests, but left thin strips as backdrops to the lake shores. An when we see it through a car window, we often see scrubland that was once fields. In a built-up area we encounter faded big apples on a supermarket wall. Around the corner the colour turns into the blue and yellow of a chain of kiosks. There are people dotted about the place.

If we get a glimpse into Finnish homes, waiting there on the dining table might be the national dish: pizza. Nor do these homes look a bit they say in those furnishing features in glossy in-flight magazines.

Table Rock, Nebraska 1992

In the warm September of 1992, Myron ‘Snappy’ Kent brought a load of watermelons into town. Sheriff Schulze dropped by for a cup of coffee, and Mary Lou picked up the mail.

Nettie and Lawrence Stehlik celebrated their 56th wedding anniversary, and eight-year-old Jill Speers found a snail while waiting for the school bus.

Table Rock revisited 2009

In January 2009 a freezing wind beats down on the prairie. Snappy, the sheriff, Mary Lou, the Stehliks and little Jill are dead.

Puppy ran into a combine harvester and lost his paw. An ice storm delayed Santa Claus from a chldren’s story hour by two weeks. In 1992 Table Rock had a population of 308. It is now 232.

Löytöretki Helsinkiin. Paikkoja, polkuja, puutarhoja. Exploring Helsinki. Places, paths, gardens. I Helsingfors på upptäcktsfärd. Platser, stigar, trädgårdar

In this book, author Julia Donner and photographer Taneli Eskola make a walking tour of the less familiar byways of their native Helsinki, in the changing seasons between 2007 and 2008. Donner quotes authors and poets while recording some of the city’s history. She takes the reader through places often ignored – small, modest enclosures between buildings that only just qualify for the name of parks, suburban parklands or the rocky spaces that have been left untouched in the heart of the city. Eskola’s photographs record the graphic details of frost and sleet as well as the first tinges of spring green, of flora, rocks, water and sky. Some of the text is printed in both Swedish and English. A map would have been useful to readers who are not familiar with Helsinki; some of the photographs also lack captions. This beautiful book, designed by Timo Numminen, is an original series of views that have not been prettified but are true to the everyday life of the city. And readers who live in Helsinki will be surprised by what they discover.

Helsinki boys by the sea: in Martti Jämsä’s Polaroid lads play on the beach; in I.K. Inha’s photograph (Hietalahden satama, ‘Hietalahti harbour’), taken a century earlier, barefoot urchins meet up on the quayside

A hundred years ago the photographer I.K. Inha (1865–1930) was asked to illustrate a tourist guide to Helsinki. He took some 200 photographs, of which some 60 were included in the book, which was published by WSOY in 1910. In his new book of photographs, OPS! Helsinki Polaroid¹, Martti Jämsä (born 1959), wanders the same streets a century on, taking snapshots with his Polaroid camera.

Inha’s glass negatives were stored in the publisher ‘s archives, where they remained until 2006, when they were moved to the Finnish Museum of Photography. Polaroid is now an obsolete piece of technology: the last examples were made by the American Polaroid Company in 2007. The familiar softness and fogginess of the details in Polaroid shots evoke a kind of nostalgia for the present.

Inha’s summery photographs, of a small but rapidly expanding town full of new buildings, offer a vivid portrait of life in what was then the Grand Duchy of Finland. His city studies were reprinted this year in Helsinki, valon kaupunki/ Helsingfors med I. K. Inhas ögon (‘Helsinki, city of light’)².

The two photographers occasionally choose the same vistas and subjects, looking at details of Helsinki from the same angles; the time and the methods are different, their worlds are worlds apart, but they offer fascinatingly dual readings of the city and its people.

Modes of transport: ‘Ylioppilastalo ja Raitiotietori’ (‘Student House and Tramway Square’) by I.K. Inha and wheels on wheels in front of the Railway Station now by Martti Jämsä

Monumental styles: contemporary street art in Martti Jämsä’s Polaroid shot, and I.K. Inha’s ‘Haaksirikkoiset’, ‘The shipwrecked’ (sculpted by Robert Stigell) on Tähtitorninmäki (‘Observatory Hill’) in 1908

Seascapes: Inha's photograph of maritime Helsinki (entitled Merisatama, ‘Sea Harbour’) a century ago, and a contemporary Polaroid shot of Helsinki harbour Polaroid by Jämsä

Forever the national poet: two views of J.L. Runeberg’s statue (1885) in the Esplanade Park; the Polaroid by Martti Jämsä and a view of the Hotel Kämp and the Grönqvist house by I.K. Inha

Windows on two centuries: ‘Oikokatu’ (‘Oikokatu street’) in the Kruununhaka district of Helsinkiby I. K. Inha, 1908, and a contemporary façade by Martti Jämsä

¹Martti Jämsä
OPS! Helsinki Polaroid
(Photographs by Martti Jämsä, an essay by Otso Kantokorpi, a poem by Ilpo Tiihonen; Musta Taide, 2009)

²Jukka Kukkonen – Riitta Toiviainen – Kjell Westö (ed.)
Helsinki – valon kaupunki / Helsingfors med I. K. Inhas ögon
(‘Helsinki – city of light’, WSOY, 2009, a publication of the Finnish Museum of Photography)