Marja Seppälä – The time and magic of forest
Juha Tanhua – Badly urbanized Sami
The forest fascinates, but how? Marja Seppälä and Juha Tanhua tell about it and more with their pictures. What lies behind these works?
Marja Seppälä:
As a child, my imagination was allowed to run free in the forest. I grew up in the forest. My aunt and father taught me about nature and I have passed this legacy on to my own children. The exhibition’s imagery has been simmering in my mind for a long time and gradually accumulated on memory cards and hard drives. The process is still going on. My pictures comment on man’s relationship with nature, the different time of trees. The experience of holiness in nature. The pictures have references to mythical forest habitats, which were whispered to me by the antique giant pines and my ancient yard firs. For me, nature is both a constant source of wonder and the source of stories and fairy tales. Nature calms you down and recharges your batteries. There is scientific evidence of the health benefits of forests and nature. Just looking at the nature picture on the refrigerator door can soothe. After all, the time of trees and forest is slow, calming. I hope that my pictures create bridges to the fairy-tale nature of the forest, its inspiration. If only the old forests dear to me would be preserved for future generations! A forest where you can walk, feel, smell, taste, hear, wonder, touch.
Juha Tanhua:
In 2005, I noticed a spill on the asphalt. The rain had created a work resembling the northern lights in the parking lot from the oil, gasoline and maybe the windshield washer fluid that had spilled from the car. Suddenly I started noticing “oil paintings” a lot and soon I started recording them on camera. There are now thousands of samples. They look like space, nebulae, galaxies, comets… well, let’s just say, pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. But since my pictures are not taken by Hubble, nor by James Webb, the name of the photo series is “Hubble? No! James Webb? No!” I took the photos of the exhibition in 2018-2019 in Ivalo parking lots while living in my home village in Ivalo Törmänen. Around the same time, I wandered through familiar hills from my childhood, looking for matching pairs of Hubble images in dead trees, stumps and rhizomes. In two summers, I walked around like this for a total of hundreds of hours. During the day I looked for filming locations, and in the late summer and early autumn nights I photographed my findings. I dig out similar forms, contrasts and color worlds from oil stains. It is possible by photographing dead wood in the dark with a long exposure and illuminating the objects with a powerful flashlight. “Light painting” of one object takes 2-15 minutes. The photo series is called “Forest Monuments”. Together, with “Hubble? No! James Webb? No!”, it forms a set, which I have named “Badly urbanized Sámi”.
Marja Seppälä – I am a photographer, photojournalist and method instructor for empowering photography, as well as a Forest Minder, hooked on nature and dogs. I come from the south, but I often move in Lapland up to the northernmost slopes of the fells, also above the tree line, where you can see the ends of the earth, hear silence and the call of grouse. The forest is essential to me. I become a different person there.
tel. +358 40 510 3494, , sunkuva.fi, @sun_kuva
Juha Tanhua – I am Sami on my mother’s side. In the middle of the 80s, I moved from Ivalo to Lahti in Southern Finland after work. I worked at Etelä-Suomen Sanomat for 10 years as a photojournalist. Since then, I have continued as a freelance photojournalist. Art photography has gone hand in hand with press photography for more than a quarter of a century. My work has been exhibited in dozens of solo exhibitions and several joint exhibitions.
, juhatanhua.kuvat.fi, @juhatanhua