The photographs and texts are from the book Linnut lumen valossa (‘Birds in the light of snow’, edited by Arno Rautavaara. Design and layout by Jukka Aalto/Armadillo Graphics. Tammi, 2011)

Snowy owl. Photo: Markus Varesvuo, 2010

Markus Varesvuo

Birds of prey have incredibly sharp eyesight. I have had the opportunity to watch the snowy owl (Bubo scandiacus) hunt in both its summer nesting habitats and on wide expanses of snow in the winter. According to my own observations, a snow owl can spot a small rodent at a distance of almost half a kilometre. (Montreal, Canada 2/2010. 800 mm+1.4x teleconverter, F11. 1/200 s, ISO 800)

Siberian jay. Photo: Markus Varesvuo, 2010

The Siberian jay (Perisoreus infaustus) is a sympathetic, curious and fearless bird.

Using a remote shutter release and a wide-angle lens, I managed to take a close-up photo of a Siberian Jay that gives its winter habitat a strong presence.

(Kuusamo region, Finland, 2/2010. 24 mm, F11. 1/250 s, ISO 800)

Goldeneyes. Photo: Markus Varesvuo, 2011

The sun shining in the blue sky, ice and glimmering crusted snow provide the best light possible for photographing birds in flight.

In this picture, the details of the lower body of male goldeneyes (Bucephala clangula) are shown in a fine manner and the blue of the background can be exposed to the correct dark shade.

(West Turunmaa region, Finland 3/2011. 800 mm + 1.4x teleconverter, F8, 1/1000 s, ISO 400)

Jari Peltomäki

Common redpoll. Photo: Jari Peltomäki, 2011

The common redpoll (Carduelis flammea) is an active visitor at winter feeding stands for birds. This male descended on a branch in picturesque snowfall, seen as long streaks in the photographs, because of the long exposure.

(Inari, Finnish Lapland 3/2008. F11, 1/60 s, ISO 400)

Tomi Muukkonen

Brambling, greenfinch, bullfinch, great tit. Photo: Tomi Muukkonen, 2011

The brambling (Fringilla montifringilla), the greenfinch (Carduelis chloris) the bullfinch (Pyrrhula pyrrhula) and the great tit (Parus major). After buying his first camera, a friend of mine took impressive photos of small birds taking flight from a feeding stand. His pictures of hawfinches and other passeriformes were on my mind for years, until I was finally able to interpret this theme in my own way.

(Saarenmaa, Estonia, 2/2010. 95 mm, F8, 1/4000s, ISO 1600)

Arto Juvonen

Blue tit. Photo: Arto Juvonen, 2011

Winter will soon be over; the catkins tell of late winter days that are rapidly becoming longer. In late March, however, winter still extends its grasp, but the blue tits (Parus caeruleus) are in spring mode, singing and showing interest in nesting boxes, and with guests at the feeder starting to disperse themselves through the woods. The strong and lucky individuals have managed to survive a hard winter.

(Loviisa, Finland 3/2011. 500 mm, F4, 1/3200 s, ISO 1600)

Translated by Jüri Kokkonen

Arto Juvonen (born 1957), Tomi Muukkonen (born 1958), Jari Peltomäki (born 1965) and Markus Varesvuo (born 1960) maintain  webpages (also in English) and have won many prizes in both Finnish and foreign competitions in nature photography.

Street cred of Hel Looks: Josua and Julius. Photo: Sampo Karjalainen

The founder of Hel Looks, which charts clothing styles of Helsinki denizens (which we featured here on the Books from Finland website), has been talking to Finnish television (programme in Finnish) about her website.

Established in 2005, the site – which has an eye for the weird and wonderful rather than the classically stylish – attracts an average of 10,000 visitors a day, two thirds of them from outside Finland.

Fashion editor Liisa Jokinen says she got the idea for the site while on holiday in Sweden. ‘I think a lot of Finns admire the Swedes’ fashion sense and in particular their stylishness. But in fact the range of styles is greater in Helsinki, and Finns have the courage to be different,’ she says.

Recent images from the site bear her comments out, and chart the sheer range of costume that she and the photographer Sampo Karjalainen set out to document. Take the 13-year-old fashionistas Josua and Julius (left), snapped on Bulevardi in central Helsinki on 1 October, for example: ‘We dance hip hop and house. It inspires our style. We try not to dress up like all other boys’; or Noel Coward fan Janne, 51, seen on 3 September: ‘I’m wearing an English tweed suit tailor-made in London. I live in Mexico, where I normally wear a white linen suit.’

Best of all, says Jokinen, is when she comes across someone for a second time without realising that she took their picture a year or so back. The image of Helsinki reflected by Hel Looks is made up of people, not buildings. ‘I believe people and their clothes contribute much more to a city than its buildings do,’ Jokinen says.

The photos on the Hel Looks site, currently numbering some 1,200, offer us visions of how people want to be seen; in this selection, few dress to play a role. People wear what they think is fun or/and stylish, and we, the onlookers, enjoy being the judges of this city catwalk.

Seal signed: Saimaa ringed seal by Erik Bruun

The graphic artist Professor Erik Bruun has been awarded the Luonnotar / National Spirit of Nature Award for 2011.

The prize, established by the Puu kulttuurissa / Wood in Culture Association in 2001 and now worth € 12,000, is awarded bi-annually to Finnish professionals of any field of culture whose work has helped to make the public in Finland and abroad more aware of Finnish culture, heritage and environment.

Erik Bruun (born 1926) – who was the Art Editor of  Books from Finland from 1976 to 1989 – is perhaps best known to the public for his numerous posters and advertisements, in particular his nature posters for the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation: the Saimaa ringed seal, the bear, eagles, owls, seagulls and other birds.

Bruun’s interest in nature photography, drawing, etching and lithography have long combined in his work for the Finnish wood processing industry as well as in his illustrative work for magazines and books and in designing postage stamps and banknotes.

A book on his life’s work, Sulka ja kynä. Erik Bruunin julisteita ja käyttögrafiikkaa (‘The quill and the pen. Posters and graphics by Erik Bruun’) by Ulla Aartomaa was published in 2007 (and reviewed in Books from Finland 3/2007). Take a look at his work on his home page.

Viljakansaari, Finland, 2008. ©Merja Salo

Do we live in the age of autopia, and if we do, what does that mean? On this earth there are now perhaps 800 million cars, all vital to our modern lifestyles. Professor and photographer Merja Salo observes landscapes through her camera with this question in mind

Extracts and photographs from Carscapes. Automaisemia (Edition Patrick Frey & Musta Taide, 2011. Translation: Laura Mänki)

The car may be the vehicle for the everyman, but not every man is a good driver. According to Hungarian- born psychoanalyst Michael Balint, good drivers have the psychological structure of philobats. With their sense of sight, they perceive space well and control it by steering their vehicle skilfully. Ocnophiles, on the other hand, are more at home as passengers. They structure the world through intimacy and touch. When driving, they cling anxiously to the steering wheel and do not perceive the continously changing situations in traffic.

New York, USA, 2008. ©Merja Salo

Introduced in 1908, the Ford Model T turned the car into an industrial product whose price fell nearly to a third of the original in 20 years. The car became a symbol of modern life, speed and mobility. Since the oil crisis in the 1970s, the car has also become a symbol of environmental destruction. Today, limited oil resources, traffic accidents, emissions and other environmental effects are seriously overshadowing the joy of driving.

Copenhagen, Denmark, 2007. ©Merja Salo

The car stands for speed and freedom. Cars realise what the French philosopher Paul Virilio calls dromology, the logic of speed and velocity. The modern world is characterised by ever-increasing speed, of which the various vehicles are symbols. Speed and velocity also influence the way in which we perceive and see scenery.

Photography with its technique has redrawn and brought to the fore the traces of speed. At slow exposure times, headlights are recorded on film as speed lines.

St Petersburg, Russia, 2009. ©Merja Salo

The flood of light created by traffic flowing on nocturnal city streets was already a symbol of modern life in the 1920s, when cars became common in the Western world.

In car advertisements, the photograph has fetishised the shiny metal and chrome.

As conquerors of the landscape, roads are also part of power politics. In the Germany of the 1930s, the building of the Autobahns was part of the Nazi regime’s Volks- motorisierung. Hitler, too, was a keen motorist: ‘I love the car. It has offered me the most beautiful moments of my life.’

Cars affect the landscape even when thay are not speeding down highways. In reality, cars stay put most of the time, parked somewhere: in the garage, in a parking  lot, by the side of the road. In the United States, 30 to 50 per cent of a city’s are is being used by cars, with the figure reaching two thirds in Los Angeles.

Assisi, Italy, 2006. ©Merja Salo

In Houston, the amount of asphalted parking surface per inhabitant equals 30 parking spaces. Annually, more than 600,000 hectares of farmland is engulfed by asphalt paving in the US countryside.

Cornwall, UK, 2005. ©Merja Salo

Parking affects the landscape at least as much as the road network does. It has altered the public space and architecture of cities. Cars fill up city squares and street space. To sum up the effect of parking on cities: form no longer follows function, fashion or even finance.

Carscapes is a collection of cars in a state of speedlessness: they have most obviously become part of the landscape – or they have started to produce their own landscape. A carscape.

Pallas (Lapland), Finland, 2010. ©Merja Salo

In the spirit of Virilio, one could talk about dromotopoi, places and spaces created by speed. The places in which speed has come to a halt are a part of the topography of the motorised landscape.

Valkeala, Finland, 2008. © Merja Salo

Jean Sibelius kodissaan. Jean Sibelius, i sitt hem. Jean Sibelius at home

The composer Jean Sibelius (1865–1957) disliked being photographed. This book contains 50 stills selected from the documentary film Jean Sibelius at home, a compilation of cinematographic material in which the composer is seen at home in 1927 and 1945. Some of the shots were originally cut, and have not been previously published. The film was made by the brothers Heikki Aho and Björn Soldan, who were neighbours of Sibelius in their childhood – their father was the author Juhani Aho, a friend of the Sibelius family. Founded in the 1920s, the film company Aho & Soldan was influenced by the experimental spirit of the Bauhaus and became known for its commissioned work aimed at spreading the image of Finland abroad. The Sibelius film offers a rare peek into the composer’s home life at his villa of Ainola. In addition to the photographs, the trilingual book also contains seven articles on Sibelius and the film. Heikki Aho’s daughter, the pioneer photographer Claire Aho relates her own memories of the 1945 filming. Jussi Brofeldt, the book’s editor, is her son.
Translated by David McDuff

Springtime: the new graduates celebrate the beginning of summer. Photos: ©Jussi Brofeldt

Documentary film-making and photography arrived in Finland in the 1920s with pioneers like Heikki Aho and Björn Soldan, who founded a film company in 1925 in Helsinki. They also took thousands of photographs of their city; in a selection taken in the turbulent 1930s, people go on about their lives, rain or shine

Photographs from Aho & Soldan: Kaupunkilaiselämää – Stadsliv – City life. Näkymiä 1930-luvun Helsinkiin (‘Views of Helsinki of the 1930s’, WSOY, 2011)
Photos: Aho & Soldan@Jussi Brofeldt. Texts, by Jörn Donner and Ilkka Kippola, are published in Finnish, Swedish and English.
The exhibition ‘City life‘ is open at Virka Gallery of the Helsinki City Hall from 1 June to 4 September.

Aho and Soldan were half-brothers, Heikki the eldest son of the writer Juhani Aho (1861–1921; an extract from one of his novels is available here) and the artist Venny Soldan-Brofeldt. (Juhani Aho changed his original Swedish surname, Brofeldt, to Aho in 1907), Björn Soldan was Aho’s son from an extramarital relationship.

A moment in the sun: Esplanade Park in the heart of the city

As Ilkka Kippola writes in a catalogue article entitled ‘Documentary and photographic modernists’ in the book that accompanies the show‚ Soldan was Finland’s first professionally trained cameraman while Aho was an expert in post-production work.

Together, they produced hundreds of documentaries as well as thousands of photographs from the 1920s until the mid 1940s. Aho’s daughter, the photographer and documentarist Claire Aho (born 1925) continued the work of her father and the company until the 1960s.

In an article entitled ‘Helsinki in the 1930s’, the author and filmmaker Jörn Donner takes a look at the history and politics of the decade.

In the autumn of 1930 political unrest began to manifest itself in the abduction of the country’s former president K.J. Ståhlberg: right-wing forces planned to transport him across the border to Soviet Union.

The shape of things to come: this photo is from 1941; the men are saluting the closing of the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki in advance of the Continuation War against the Soviet Union, which began later that year

A large number of farmers had marched in Helsinki earlier that year to demonstrate, demanding more authoritarian order in place of parliamentary democracy.

The abduction proved a failure, and the Ståhlbergs were allowed to return to home. However, parliamentary democracy was not yet safe in a country that had only gained independence as recently as 1917, followed by a  bloody Civil War in 1918.

In 1932 an armed right-wing extremist rebellion also failed.

Summer flood? The Railway Square taken by surprise

Later a broader coalition of political parties was able to develop democracy – which proved vital later, as Donner points out, when, in 1939, the Winter War broke out.

The war caused the cancellation of  the 1940 Olympics, which eventually took place in Helsinki 12 years later.

Summer 2011 in Helsinki has been the warmest in several decades – the photos here give a few glimpses of sunny days in the city eight decades ago.

Sun is fun: a Helsinki beach in the 1930s. Photos: ©Jussi Brofeldt

I.K. Inha – Valokuvaaja, kirjailija, kulttuurin löytöretkeilijä

I.K. Inha (1865–1930) was a photographer, a writer, a translator and a journalist. He is known particularly for his photographic journeys in Finland and Russian Karelia. Both the texts and the photographs in Inha’s landscape and nature works are of a high aesthetic standard. This book focuses on Inha’s lesser-known works and the various phases of his life. Inha’s travel diary documents the cycle journey he made as a student in 1886 to Germany and Switzerland. In 1897 Inha was appointed Finland’s first-ever foreign correspondent; from Athens he reported on events such as the Greco-Turkish War. In 1899 and 1901 Inha was posted to England, where he observed Queen Victoria’s funeral and the coronation of King Edward VII. Aamu Nyström, the niece of Inha’s brother, has had access to letters, photographs and written and oral recollections of family members.
Translated by Ruth Urbom

Words and images from the book Leikin varjo / Guises of play (Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova and Musta Taide, 2011)

‘Ring dance’ by Ulla Jokisalo (pigment print and pins, 2009)

The playing hand is true as only the human body can be true, but in play the hand is something else. It is a new creator, accepting and gentle, arousing the lifeless to life. Everything has its meaning, for play is always about something, something of significance. Play is a mysterious celebration for at least one person. It is passionate improvisation on a long-term dream.

‘Invisible hand’ by Ulla Jokisalo (pigment print, original: cut-out paper, watercolour, 2005)

In play, everything is given a name and the connections of things are revealed in the fresh naturalness of a new-born world. The mysterious alliances and mergers of play feel as if they had always been intended for each other.

Play chooses its own means, metaphors and details. It selects its illusions and secrets. It cannot and must not be ordered by anyone. It is always on the side of dreams, reverie, ideas and possibilities.

In play, rules give freedom beautiful, harmonious, transient, and thus vanishing, form. Enveloped in harmony one can even bear chaos. The right hand of someone in my left hand, the left hand of someone in my right. The rhythm is the same, gazes meet and cross within the circle: the same and truly shared play for all of us. No one gives orders, for the circle is shared in a perfect manner by all its members. The players are enthralled by the dance, but in a shared and joint manner. The circle rises and takes flight, for no one restrains or disturbs the play. It has a conscience, and for that reason, too, it is absolutely real.

Playfulness expands our idea of what is real or contiguous in life. What is meaningful? Play gives the answers. Play with perfect motion is replenished all the time, in its order, content and narrative. Play stops us from sinking into indifference or numbness. It is the arch-enemy of asceticism, denial of life, and being a bore. It defends mad order, the lack of discipline, unruliness, anarchy, utopia.

Scissors and thread

We embroidered and embroidered, stitched and stitched, heads lowered, backs bent, cheerfully looking out of the corners of our eyes, losing our sense of time….

‘Marjatta. Point of view III’ by Ulla Jokisalo (embroidery, thread and needle on pigment print, 2008)

The sound os the scissors is best heard against a tabletop: they bite chew and crush the cloth. The tabletop amplifies the sounds, lent rhythm by the metallic clash of the scissors. The solid surface of the table is revealed from under the cut fabric….

‘To stand on her own two feet’ by Ulla Jokisalo (cut-out pigment print, embroidery, thread, needles and pins on fabric, 2004)

You know you have to look out for a needle. A weapon and means of torture, yet something that heals and mends.

But thread is even more. Fear can be touched within beauty. Thread can be a soft support, giving way and breaking if it’s really necessary. It can be a slashing line, cutting without mercy. Twist it the wrong way and you can separate its strands to be seen. Long ago it was tamed into the cells of waffle cloth, when it played one-dimensional, curved to make angles and pretend to obey. Cross-stitching also put magic thread in place, shackled it and made it serve images.

Poetry

According to Francis Bacon, ‘poetry is as a dream of learning’. Unattainable, coherent and true learning lies somewhere in the depths of dreams. Poetry has the ability to reveal it, byt only for a fleeting moment that cannot be expressed in words. But after that moment one will no longer desire the frightened obedience of the weather-vane. This moment freezes history into a smiling face whose forginving honesty hurts the heart. Let it hurt.

Translation: Jüri Kokkonen

‘Well-read’ by Ulla Jokisalo (cut-out pigment print, embroidery, thread, pins and needle on fabric, 2010)

Dagbok förd under min resa i Centralasien och Kina 1906–07–08, Vol 1–3

Carl Gustaf Mannerheim (1867–1951), a Finnish officer in the Imperial Russian Army, later Commander-in-Chief of the Finnish Army and President of Finland, undertook a military reconnaissance mission, posing as an academic researcher, to Central Asia and China in 1906–1908. His journey on horseback across Asia to Peking also generated a wealth of ethnographic material: field notes, photographs and artefacts. In his travel diaries, Mannerheim describes the landscapes as well as his diverse encounters with the inhabitants of the areas he travelled through. During his visit to a Tibetan monastery, Mannerheim was pelted with stones by pilgrims. He gave the Dalai Lama an automatic pistol as a gift. These journals are now being published in full for the first time in their original language, Swedish, including Mannerheim’s own notes concerning his military mission. The photographs, some of which have never been published before, show that Mannerheim was a skilled photographer. Harry Halén, an expert in Central Asian languages and cultures, has contributed an extensive preface and copious notes.
Translated by Ruth Urbom

Ladies in hats: in the 1920s Vörå hats were only used by gentlewomen (and smoking was perhaps a little risqué). Photo: Erik Häggblom

Blickfång. En tidsresa med Vöråfotografen Erik Hägglund (‘In focus. A journey in time with the photographer Erik Hägglund from Vörå’. Red. [Ed. by] Katja Hellman, Meta Sahlström & Monica West. Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2010

Old photographs may prove that what is utterly local can be perfectly universal.

That’s certainly the impression the reader gets by looking at the pictures taken by Eric Hägglund between 1910 and 1960.

The village of Vörå (in Finnish, Vöyri) on the west coast of Finland, near the Ostrobothnian city of Vasa (in Finnish, Vaasa) is traditionally mostly a Swedish-speaking community. Erik Hägglund, born 1884, lived, photographed and died there in 1962.

The man behind the camera: Erik Hägglund in his studio, ca. 1910–1912

An idyll bygone: a view over Strandby village in Oravais by the sea. Photo: Erik Hägglund (date unknown)

His legacy consists of 40,000 glass negatives, kept in order by himself and his family, and in the 1970s donated to the Svenska litteratursällskapet (the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland).

The man behind the camera specialised in portraits of people in his studio, but there was very little he wouldn’t record through his lens. Hägglund photographed landscape, buildings, work places, buildings, shops and homes of the villagers. The people in his pictures pose at work, in festivities, in schools or  hospitals, out on the fields.

A group portrait: a family standing outside in front of a cardboard sheet. Photo: Erik Hägglund, 1910s

Life seems, in general, idyllic and peaceful, and people content with their life – but Hägglund also took his camera out when, for example, preparations for the Second World War began to be made in Ostrobothnia. Hägglund’s best portraits bring to mind another early professional on the opposite side of Finland, Victor Barsokevitch (1863–1933), who spent most of his professional life in the town of Kuopio (his work was introduced in Books from Finland 1/2008).

Both photographers often manage to catch something in their models’ expressions that may make us suddenly wonder if these people are our contemporaries, just clad in old-fashioned clothes…

Sunday best: young men from Karvat in 1924. Photo: Erik Hägglund

Midsummer feast: coffee blended with something stronger. Photo: Erik Hägglund, 1957

Winter smiles: village children in Kovik, 1948. Photo: Erik Hägglund

Extracts from Työn tekijät. Muotokuvia suomalaisesta työstä. / Doing the job. Portraits of Finnish working life by Eija Irene Hiltunen. Texts: Pasi Alametsä. Translations: Joseph White. Layout: Petri Kuokka & Eija Irene Hiltunen (Avain, 2009)

A waitress. Photo: Eija Irene Hiltunen, 2001

One of the most important aims of my portraits has been to record an image of the times. I chose work as the common denominator because it relates to the social structure on so many levels.

The ‘visual inventory’ of Weimar Germany by the classic photographer August Sander has been the major inspiration for my work. He made a huge impression on me during my student days. He told of the upheavals of his own time through his portraits, as the old class society broke down, and of the time before the Second World War and the birth of modern Germany. Sander beautifully depicted history through the individual, and his portraits have remained as testaments to life during that era.

Another aspect of my series was the comparison of present day work photos with those of Sander’s time. Labour and the work environment have changed but what about the employees themselves? It used to be possible to ‘read’ what work a person was involved in from external appearances.

To what extent can we tell what a worker does from his or her appearance today? How thoroughly do we internalise occupational behaviour, consciously or unconsciously? Different trades and professions have their own behaviour, style of dress, humour and even jargon. Is there such a thing as an occupational image?

During each shoot I asked the subject to adopt a ‘neutral’, peaceful expression, in order to that the viewer would not interpret the subject’s state of mind but that the attention would shift to the occupation and the various details of the subject’s environment.

Sander’s individual portraits together make up a social fabric. So for him, each individual picture was less important than their sequence, their relationship one to another. I have the same idea in my own project.

I have also felt the allure of collecting in my project. Whenever I have completed a new photograph I have placed it among my previous works. So the collection changes with each new picture, as does the significance of the new picture. I have become a collector.

I also interviewed my subjects. My questions concerned the significance to them of work, the good and bad sides of their job, their dream job, the future and their dreams and aspirations. To my surprise, many replied that they would still do their jobs even if their income were assured in other ways. This says a lot about the significance and value a person places on his or her work.

Laboratory assistant, in charge of processing. Photo: Eija Irene Hiltunen, 2000

‘I’d say I’m in a good but fairly realistic job. I don’t know any better jobs because I’ve never worked anywhere else, but this suits me so far.

‘The working conditions are quite strenuous sometimes. You can see it and hear it when you’re having a bad day, but when I’ve slept well and the machines are working properly I like the job. And of course it gets hot here inside this suit, although you even get used to that after a while.

‘I might have wondered about the value of this work from time to time, but now I suppose it is quite important, because we supply samples to hospitals too!

‘If I lost this job I’d look for work straight away, even digging ditches. But the future of this operation looks good enough that I don’t expect the work to end just like that. My remedy for reducing unemployment would be to curtail working hours so that overall earnings could be cut by ten percent.

‘I’m not looking for the traditional red summer cottage and a great swarm of kids. I just want to be happy and comfortable with what I do.’

Fishmongers. Photo: Eija Irene Hiltunen, 2006

‘If the dream job means doing something that does not feel like work, then I suppose I’m on the right track. Certainly I didn’t have to go far to learn it, since my late father was a fisherman, as was my brother, later on. We all had the same simple idea, though – to put food on peoples’ tables. Nowadays there are only a handful of professional fishermen working in Padasjoki, and the reason has to be the economic uncertainty of the job. You’re constantly at the mercy of the weather and you are never guaranteed a catch. The basic rule is that if someone promises you a certain kind of fish at the end of a week, you can be almost sure it won’t be fresh.

‘The fishmonger’s season begins when the ice recedes and continues till it comes back. I spend the winter making crayfish traps, for myself and for sale, and then smoking the fish I catch for restaurants. Summer is the most hectic time, though. A childhood friend comes to help me out but the working day still stretches round the clock, even at weekends. I get the best kicks on Saturdays when dozens of customers queue up in a good mood for the fresh-caught fish and crayfish, depending on the season. When I began this job people were complaining about why there were no locally caught fish when a nearby EU supported fishing harbour was exporting shells that Finns look down on. Nowadays we can offer more than just frozen supermarket foods and other plastic wrapped products.

‘In the future I intend to concentrate more on developing the business. The Baltic is a competitor with its farmed, unecological trout but it will never be able to beat the Finnish lakes for purity. But because you cannot advertise the arrival of lake fish in advance, in the press, the fishmonger in the market can offer almost the same surprise in the morning that the fisherman had a short while ago during the night.’

Temporary hospital pastor. Photo: Eija Irene Hiltunen, 2001

‘Being a hospital pastor means discussing questions of sickness, guilt, suffering and death with patients, relatives and staff. Becoming infirm and having to give up so many things often provokes the deepest questions. Sometimes it is very difficult and taxing to dwell on such matters but it is also important, valuable and rewarding.

‘Faith is a gift that can provide hope and confidence when someone must face sickness and approaching death. I cannot give a patient faith. I can only talk with them, help them in their search and pray with them. The clergy too are only ordinary people and they experience their calling in different ways. I also reflected carefully before I dared to believe I had what it takes for this work. There are many expectations associated with the priesthood but I’m still the same person I was before I was ordained. I sometimes have to seek a balance between superhuman expectations and my own ways of working.

‘There is far more work to do in a hospital than I can ever actually do, an enormous number of people who yearn for someone to listen. Patients are ever more infirm and need a great deal of help. They need people here who have time.’

Shareholders in a common barn, organic farmers. Photo: Eija Irene Hiltunen, 2002

‘We’re a group of friends who have known each other since we were children. At some stage we noticed that we all had a similar interest in making a bigger investment and expanding our activities in other ways. Actually, we could each have made the investment ourselves but it would have been a bigger risk compared with the gain.

‘We each have our own area of responsibility in this joint barn venture, which is mainly for organic farming. There’s financial and bureaucratic management, tending the animals, the arable farming and so on. This way we can be less tied down to our work than we could with a traditional farm, which would be more vulnerable in other ways, too. But financial reasons are not the only ones for organic farming. We think this is only one of the modern the ways to do this job. Besides, the land is not ours, we are borrowing it from our children.

‘Never mind if the bureaucracy has increased and the common EU regulations are stiff and slow to change – the EU does at least offer more opportunities for organic farming than the previous agricultural policy did. One demonstration of this is the current demand for organic produce, which already exceeds the supply. In fact we hope that new policies will help to bring about new companies in the countryside.’

Senior research and design engineer. Photo: Eija Irene Hiltunen, 2009

‘I felt the fascination of the new when I first came to Finland. Then I met the day to day reality and I got fed up. Many of my friends left the country. They felt the pay in this field was higher elsewhere and the Finnish weather was depressing. Although I have already spent five years here, I am sure that my future lies elsewhere. My engineering competence is such that I could get a job anywhere in the world. To me, work should be enjoyable and a modern way of earning money, so that I can have a personal life like travel and hobbies. At some later stage in life I will return to my own country. I do intend to visit Finland in the future, too, but mainly in the summer.

‘The best thing here is that the system works. The work atmosphere is relaxed and its easy to push things forward. I also feel I get a good energy here since there is no opposing force in the form of bureaucracy. Colleagues in India share a deeper level of affection for one another, whereas in Finland colleagues are literally that, usually just colleagues. Though I spend eight hours at work I know very little about my workmates but in India that is not the case.

‘Another attraction is that Finland is more absorbent ground for new inventions. By international standards, the country is also very business-friendly, although the taxation side leaves very much to be desired. Here, however, after the constructing and testing it is possible to come up with some great idea and sell it abroad. And it has also been observed here that the new generation wants to work in its own way. I am also certain about what I want for myself. I want to get rich but I also want to spend it all straight away. When you find yourself floating in still water it’s time to start swimming. That’s my motto.’

Senior lecturer in neurosurgery, head of section, 2008. Photo: Eija Irene Hiltunen, 2008

‘I remember that as a child I knew I’d be a doctor. Specialising as a brain surgeon, however, was more a matter of chance (my childhood friend had a malignant brain tumor)…. I think a good surgeon needs manual dexterity and the ability to make quick decisions, as well as empathy and sensitivity, the latter not always being immediately evident. In my case it’s also a matter of measuring myself and competing against myself.

‘It’s a matter of passion for the job that keeps me together – if I didn’t operate, I wouldn’t feel like me. The most important motive, however, is always the desire to help people in a tangible way.

‘The high standard of Finnish neurosurgery is widely known around the world. The system works efficiently in Finland although the hospitals do not always look high-tech from the outside. But inside the equipment is of top quality. Hospitals don’t compete against each other like they do in some other countries, where the standard is more variable. Patients in Finland are in a class of their own, too. They are usually educated, knowledgeable and demanding but nevertheless sensible and most have realistic expectations. It’s also easy to discuss even difficult matters with them.

‘I aim constantly to improve myself, to progress with my career, and if all goes well become a full professor in neurosurgery. I’m not interested in working abroad because the skills are right here. I also aim to have a long career and to work as long as possible, bearing in mind that one day it will be time to quit this somewhat addictive profession before I have to be ‘carried out’ from the operation theatre.’

Suomalainen aarniometsä

This book explains the cultural significance of forests – particularly virgin forests – to Finns. That term is used to refer to old-growth forests in their natural state, characterised by trees of different ages, an abundance of decaying tree remains, and continuous incremental changes. Nowadays around four per cent of Finnish forests are in a natural or near-natural state, and light is being shed on their ecosystems and the history of the slowly vanishing virgin forests. They are associated with deep-seated values and a multiplicity of roles throughout history. To many artists forests have been a significant elemental force, worthy even of worship; peasants and the timber industry have exploited the virgin forests. The authors also consider whether answers to key environmental issues will be found in old-growth forests: safeguarding natural diversity and slowing climate change. In addition to illustrative material from the authors, the book contains photographs by award-winning photographers Ritva Kovalainen and Sanni Seppo.

Jorma Puranen: Juovlajohka, Norway, 1997

Photographer Jorma Puranen (born 1951) has long been concerned with nature and the representation of northern landscapes, particularly Lapland, as well as light and its reflection.

One of his most famous projects is Imaginary Homecoming. In the 1990s, on a visit in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, he found some old archive boxes full of glass negatives. They were ethnographical images of the Sámi, taken by G. Roche, employed by the French Count Bonaparte on an expedition to Lapland in 1884.

Puranen took them back to the wildernesses of Lapland and photographed them once more in their native surroundings, where they became a photographic installation in the tundra. He published them in his book Kuvitteellinen kotiinpaluu / Imaginary Homecoming (Pohjoinen, 1999).

Puranen’s 2006 series Icy Prospects explores landscape: the large pictures are made by painting wood with black gloss paint, reflecting the landscape on the wood and photographing the reflection.

Snow, ice, water, sky and trees are portrayed the way that brings Impressionism to mind, as Liz Wells writes in her introduction in the book entitled Icy Prospects, published by Hatje Cantz (Germany, 2009).

Jorma Puranen: Icy Prospects (series, 2006)

A new exhibition of Jorma Puranen’s work from 1992 to 2010, at EMMA, the Espoo Museum of Modern Art, opened on 29 September; it runs until 9 January 2011. Partly retrospective, it features Puranen’s techniques of chromogenic colour and black and white photography, showcasing his highly original style.

Russian dogs by Pentti Sammallahti (Solovki, White Sea, 1992)

How does he do it? The dogs pose in Pentti Sammallahti’s photographs like professional models who know how to keep still.

Sammallahti admits sausages and sardines sometimes help communication.

In 1998, in the old, printed version of Books from Finland, we published a selection of Sammallahti’s photographs, together with some written impressions by the British photographer and essayist John Berger. According to him, people who first see the selection of Sammallahti photographs he has, ‘usually gasp at first, and then peer closer, smiling,’ as they seem to remember something they knew as children, but which they have forgotten how to see – from the times ‘we talked to the dogs, listened to their secret and kept it to ourselves.’

A Helsinki dog by Pentti Sammallahti (1882)

Sammallahti (born 1950) is one of the pioneers of the Finnish photographic art and fine art printing, which he has also taught at the University of Industrial Arts and Design in Helsinki.

Specialising in black-and-white photography of people and their environment, Sammallahti has travelled extensively throughout Russia and Siberia, France and Finland.

This autumn his work is featured in a retrospective exhibition at the Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki; you can see a selection of his photos here.

Helsinki people on the big wheel: Linnanmäki amusement park, 1968

Photographs and excerpts from Helsinki 1968 by Claire Aho and Kjell Westö (text in Finnish, Swedish and English; WSOY, 2010)

A year that rocked the world: 1968. The Vietnam War, the Chinese cultural revolution, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, hunger in Biafra. Helsinki that year: a quiet little city, in a quiet little country. But Finland’s baby-boomers, born after the war, were now coming of age, resulting in the beginnings of a change of generation in politics; and the students of Helsinki University  joined the global student unrest of this ‘crazy year’. Photographer Claire Aho takes a series of photographs of her home town, participating in an exhibition in Kiel, Germany. Forty-two years later her photos are published in Helsinki 1968, together with reflections by Kjell Westö, whose novels are deeply rooted in his native city. Here are words and images of Helsinki that mirror the past – and the present

Both the city and its people carry their past with them, find it hard to let go, and don’t really want to. Many of us are reluctant to embrace the new. Hence there is often something ambivalent, something enigmatic in the frozen moment of the photograph….

Winter footprints: a snowy street

Is it just nostalgia when I wonder if, in spite of the fact that many of the ideas current back then eventually led to drug addiction, terrorism and  totalitarian thinking, that era was not the last chance for us Westerners to do something about our own lack of restraint, to change our lifestyle altogether  in a saner, more sustainable direction?

And isn’t it awfully pessimistic to think like this? The moral imperative for a change of this kind is even greater today: we simply have to achieve it, otherwise our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will have no future.

A clergyman is interviewed in a weekly magazine in 1968. The theme is lack of values and enduring morality, everything that was once solid and reliable  now seems to be melting into thin air. ‘The modern city dweller’s biggest problem is loneliness’, the clergyman says.

Fresh fish, good coffee? Business in the city

Forty-two years later, when for decades we have asked for everything and also expected to get it – more, more often, and better – over half of Finnish households experience loneliness, and it is even more prevalent today.

In a moving interview published in a weekly magazine in 1968, some men and women wonder, after being struck by misfortune: ‘Did we expect too much from life?’ As if Finland’s sorely-tried people still couldn’t believe that the emerging prosperity was real.

In the pram: on the way to the future

In Claire Aho’s photographs, the scarred memories of the old and the hunger for life of the young are both clearly visible. Now the old people in the photographs are gone, those who were young are growing old, and the toddlers of that year have turned forty.

The earth will soon have seven billion people, whereas in 1968 it only contained three and a half billion.

And Helsinki? Do we still live in a remote part of the world and the present age? Or has the distance disappeared?

Most of the distance has gone. Internationalisation began at a slow pace in the mid-1980s, but has since accelerated. In 1989 the Finnish Post Office employed people from twenty different countries. Today the company’s successor, Itella, employs twenty times as many foreign migrants, and they hail from 71 different countries.

The times may not always be what we perceive them to be, but one thing is certain: they change.

A spring weekend: Eteläsatama harbour, central Helsinki