UNTITLED

Janne Lehtinen has, throughout his entire career, exercised an extremely personal approach in reflecting upon his life and the trials and tribulations of how he has evolved into the person he is today. In his most recent series, we find him as a solitary figure balancing himself between bricks, balloons, and his need to disappear. These photographs appear as disconnected reflections from his inner self. Lehtinen transforms the antagonist into the victim and then back again, using repetitive variations from the same motif to accentuate his intention. His photographs turn the ordinary into poetic moments where we don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Most importantly, Lehtinen is a storyteller. His art is a mixture of sculpture and performance and is realized in the studio or in natural surroundings with no audience. It’s more of a dance where the head follows the heart with the photographs representing the moment the two merge. His subject matter may vary from his childhood memories to tracing the working patterns of his father as he did in his second book, The Descendants. Yet the common denominator found in all his work is how he uses his notion of the family to interpret the ordinary so as to create the extraordinary.