The Art of Affordable Collecting
Persons Projects has created a new section that focuses on how to start and develop a photo collection for those who are not familiar with buying photography. On our Instagram twice a month we propose a carefully selected photographs. We are specifically offering a selection of works by established artists in smaller sizes as well as an emphasis on younger artists in the beginnings of their careers, whose works are modestly priced. This collection is also now on our website.
Why collect photography, how to do it wisely, and what to look for in young artists?
From a price-point perspective, photography is one of the more accessible mediums, to begin with. We advise young collectors to purchase works that challenge as well as inspire them. It's equally important to be able to live with and appreciate the collection your creating. The value of any piece is a combination of aesthetics, content, and how it challenges you. Build your collection around who you are and how it reflects your views in general. By supporting emerging artists, the collector becomes part of that individual's professional orbit, and it's emotionally rewarding in following the development of a young artists' career.
Why collect the Helsinki School?
It represents a 25 years history of six generations of artists that utilizes the photographic process as a tool for conceptual thinking. It's the longest sustainable platform of its kind worldwide and has generated over 180 publications of artists plus 6 volumes of the Helsinki School book series. Its artists are represented throughout many significant museums in Europe, South America, and the United States.
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Santeri Tuori, Sky (round) #1, 2016
Pigment print, Diasec, 12 mm acrylic, ø 18 cm
Santeri Tuori has been engaging with the properties of nature and its power of change over the past two decades. In his Sky series, Tuori shows the sky as a valuable landscape on its own. The works are a combination of several photographs taken at different times. The layering of black and white and colour photographs allows the works to exist on the thin border of painting and photography. More works from Tuori's Sky series could have been seen at the group exhibition, In the Sky Unlike a Bird.
Pigment print, framed, 33 x 43.5 cm
Mikko Rikala's works represent research into spatiality and temporality, emerging from both philosophical as well as scientific, nature-related thoughts. He looks at the complexity of the cyclical passage of time, and the traces left on our surroundings. Rikala reflects on and compares philosophical thoughts of the East and concepts related to Minimal Art, to the experiences of the relativity of time, speed, distance, presence, and absence. More works from Rikala could have been seen at our exhibition, In the Sky Unlike a Bird.
Pigment print on aluminum, 31 x 31 cm
Rooted in classical documentary and narrative photography, Jari Silomäki has developed a unique way of storytelling, constantly finding new ways of exploring the realms of fact and fiction, documentation and imagination. His series My Weather Diary isrn much like the quick sketches of the landscape artist John Constable: Silomäki takes one photograph each day and assembles a personal weather diary. The artist adds handwritten text to his photographs; rather than plainly describing the forecast, Silomäki depicts a personal mood. The series has a tone of nostalgia while suspending the viewer in the present moment.
Milja Laurila, Atlas und Grundriss der Psychiatrie (5-year-old-child), 2013 Archival pigment print, Diasec, 47 x 35 cm
In her work, Milja Laurila questions the ability of a photograph to forget what it once was proof of — does an image detached from its context still remain related to the original semantic field, or transform into something else? This piece is from her series Atlas und Grundriss der Psychiatrie (2013)rn which was inspired by a German psychiatric book from the year 1902. The book not only describes different types of mental diseases, but also attempts to visually demonstrate them in the form of photographic images of patients. Laurila titles her 2013 series after the book, but she aims to relieve the subjects of the way they were viewed at the time – abnormal, degenerate, insane, less deserving.
Archival pigment print, 40 x 52 cm
Itkonen is an artist who focuses on Greenland’s indigenous populations and how climate change has affected their community and livelihood since 1995. The community's story has many chapters and Itkonen’s photographs help bind them to a rich but tragic history, where their way of life is slowly being forgotten. The melting sea ice creates substantial disruption: Hunting polar bears and other Arctic animals has been a vital part of life and a main food source for many Inuit households, as, agriculture is not an option in the far north. Itkonen's intimate photographs of this tiny but proud community, unfold and immortalize a story line that’s filled with love and loss, hope and tragedy, but no ending.
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Chromogenic colour print, oak frame, 47.5 x 37 cm
Niina Vatanen has challenged, seduced, and explored time as a mystery from the beginning of her career. Starting with her own personal diaries to archival materials found in museums, Vatanen has repeatedly attempted torn depict time and our perception of it as the core question in her work. For her series, Archival Studies / A Portrait of an Invisible Woman (2013–14), Vatanen worked with black-and-white and color negatives by the Finnish amateur photographer Helvi Ahonen. Obtaining these negatives from the Finnish Museum of Photography’s archives, Vatanen was more interested in the materiality of the negatives than in their documentary quality. She sought out damaged negatives in particular – those that carry the marks of time passing as well as the scars of archival (mis)treatment.
Archival pigment print, 43 x 60 cm
Vatanen has challenged and explored time as a mystery from the beginning of her career. Starting with her own personal diaries to archival materials found in museums, she has repeatedly attempted to depict time and our perception of it as the core question in her work.
Shipwreck is part of the series Time Atlas, in which Niina Vatanen is overlapping and intertwining photographs from different sources playfully and poetically. Coming from old encyclopedias, personal, intimate archives, newspapers, manuals, or the vast internet imagery, the materials, when combined, create new and inventive connections between different and otherwise unrelated fields. The series focuses on our perception of time and explores the convolution of history, personal experiences, and visual recollection. The series is accompanied by a book with the same title.
Elina Brotherus, I Am Still Alive, after On Kawara, I am still alive 1970–2000, 2016
Pigment print, 22 x 14 cm
We recommend Elina Brotherus who is one of the most well-known artists within the Helsinki School. Her works have alternated between autobiographical to art historical approaches, utilizing nearly any aspect of her personal life to those of the most iconic images from 19-20th-century paintings. Brotherus' most current focus is directed towards works from the 1960-70s. Her fascination with the Fluxus movement begins with the legendary German curators, René Block and his wife Ursula. Rene Block's gallery and Ursula's music store were the principal sources for Fluxus art in Europe. Through their friendship and time shared, Brotherus had both the opportunity and sources to begin her series with a work dedicated to On Kawara's project I Am Still Alive that consists of a series of telegrams sent over a thirty-year period to a wide range of recipients bearing the message "I Am Still Alive". Brotherus’ interpretation of this Kawara’s work embodies both the spirit as well as the irony that was fluid within that Fluxus period at time. Brotherus emphasizes, "it is not about mimicking another artist's original performances, but studying and understanding the written protocols, the so-called 'event scores'."
contact us:
berlin@personsprojects.com
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Archival pigment ink print, 40 × 32 cm
Sanna Kannisto is one of the most unique and distinguished artists from the Helsinki School. She explores the intersection between nature, science, and art. Her photographs are a study of different methods, approaches, and theories in how humankind interacts with our natural environment. During her numerous stays in Peru, French Guiana, Brazil, and Finland, she became a visual researcher, borrowing working methods from the natural sciences, anthropological practices, and from still-life painting. To create her images, Kannisto builds portable temporary stages or, in her words, "field studios.” Kannisto states: "I like the fact that in the act of flying, the bird’s stopped motion is so sculptural. The speed of the bird is challenging to frame, and I’m able to rotate it in space through photography.”
The work Phoenicurus phoenicurus,rn is dedicated to a relatively common summer migrant from winter grounds in Africa. This small bird has a distinctive habit of shivering its bright orangey tail.
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Archival pigment print, 30 x 30 cm
Jannern Lehtinen’s art is a mixture of sculpture and performance and is realized in the studio or in natural surroundings with no audience. These performance-enhanced, staged photographs carry a sense of melancholy bordering on absurdity. It’s more of a dance where the head follows the heart with the photographs representing the moment the two merge. He has, throughout his career, exercised an extremely personal approach in reflecting upon his life using himself as his own model. In the featured photo we find him as a solitary figure balancing himself between bricks, balloons, and his need to disappear.
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Archival pigment print, 21 x 31.5 cm
Anni Leppälä is one of the most outstanding Helsinki School representatives, whose acquired recognition on a global scale. She was awarded the title the Young Artist of the Year in Finland, 2010. Her photographs are timeless images that evolve out of a trust stemming from how we as viewers are invited into her world as neutral observers. They all share a universal feeling of something familiar. She uses her images as a poet with words, leaving us with something "outside” the image, something out of sight, a sensibility without a face to name it.
In her Mirror (Blanket) work, the spectator can find a young woman dressed in red with her back turned against the spectator, hiding her face. Läppala often uses the red color, which symbolically may be related to a time when a girl becomes a woman, or it is often associated with passion and love or danger. The photo uncovers hidden emotions, memories in dreamlike settings, which convey a deep sense for a place that’s not hers to own but to share.
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Pigment print, framed, 46.67 x 35 cm
Jaakko Kahilaniemi is drawn to places of radical interference between people and the natural forces. With his series Nature Like Capital he explores the complex and contradictory relationship today’s society has in coexisting with nature and finding their mutual path for a healthy future. His images reflect his intentions for bridging a joint understanding between how we live within our environment in contrast to the nature of who we are as a society.
Whether it be his own inherited forest or the aftermath of a forest fire from another property, Kahilaniemi presents his ideas in a minimal way letting the image speak for itself. He creates a visual language that unveils its secrets by challenging the viewer to step outside their own preconceived comfort zones, and look at the broader context of where we fit in to the nature of all things.
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Mikko Rikala,
when burned, produces smoke that transcends the mundane, 2020
Pigment print, 31.4 x 23.9 cm
Mikko Rikala’s works represent research into spatiality and temporality that emerges from both philosophical as well as scientific, nature-related thoughts. His preferred medium is photography, although he frequently references and revisits drawing and sculpture. He uncovers the relationship between what is seen as rational on the one hand and what is perceived as irrational on the other. His work is a reflection that merges mystical and philosophical thoughts through the empirical process of observation.
In this work, when burned, produces smoke that transcends the mundane, Rikala uses his camera as a means for monitoring through the meditative act of observation in drawing out the medicinal to the philosophical aspects inherent with the physical plane of what an object is, be it a plant, rock or bees hive. He creates visual dichotomies that contrast opposing world views in how we should be living with nature as opposed to using technology as a tool to overpower it.
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Silver gelatin print, 18.8 x 14.5 cm
Pentti Sammallahti is one of the most celebrated internationally accomplished photographers to ever emerge from the Nordic region. He is both a mentor and master on every level of the photographic process. Whether it is a man, tree, or animal, his chosen subjects all seem to move unassumingly within the image's frame, lyrical in their compositions. His photographs feel as if they were alive as if they vibrate with a vitality that can't be merely chemically induced but rather emotionally conceived. Sammallahti's photographs reflect a life commitment to finding the balance within nature not as an outside observer but as a voyager within. His works contain the essence of what photography is truly about: timing, light, and capturing the magic of the moment. In this regard, Sammallahti states: "My photographs are not taken, but given to me." The essence which additionally is confirmed by inventing his own printing techniques and meticulously toning system.
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UV-print on acrylic glass, 25 x 20 cm
Milja Laurila is one of the most important artists of the Helsinki School who research into the perception of femininity.
The half-naked body is printed on transparent acrylic glass, which makes the figure translucent, almost weightless. The vitreous print, which can be associated with the glass plates used in photography, work as a metaphor for the fragility of the portrayed subjects. The clear and hard material enables the figures to be formed through chiaroscuro as three-dimensional reflections on the walls. These soft shadows are bound to the movement of the viewer.
Milja Laurila is investigating how the concept of knowledge is constructed through images.
Her works raise questions through their transparency in how our pictorial realm is perceived through the act of being looked at. She plays with the ability of a photograph to transmit the representation of reality. By detaching the images from their original context, the artist places them in a challenging position; she lets them speak on their own, in their own voice. Laurila’s delicate human figures, who instead of representing the depicted individuals are actually reflecting our way of perceiving the world. She asks, if images detached from their original context, still remain related to the original semantic field or transform into something else. Can an image of a young girl’s spine suffering from scoliosis transform without captions into a sculptural beauty?
contact us:
berlin@personsprojects.com
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