Nanna Saarhelo

Sleep with me

Sleep with me consists of photographs featuring people sleeping the night in my bed. The images are taken straight from above, so that the bed space is entirely visible. I ask one person at a time to be photographed and I place myself to sleep next to them. The camera is programmed to take a picture every half an hour.

In the Sleep with me -series the photographer places herself next to her sitter - under the scrutinizing eye of the camera - and the space behind the camera is vacated. Thus the photographer exposes herself to the same treatment as the sitter and the unidirectional portrait is disturbed.

The work also includes implications towards people´s relationships: shared choreographies are formed during the night, sometimes the movements appear as if synchronised. However, the people photographed are present in dream world, outside the boundaries of the photograph, and it becomes difficult to define their personal qualities.

Each work consists of a series of 7-8 photographs. In addition, there are a few single-image pieces.

Imagined Landscapes

Imagined landscapes is an on-going project that started while I lived in Barcelona, and traveled in Catalonia and the Balearic Islands. Instead of documenting the city and its events, the photographs became a fragmented map of a mental landscape, related to a time and a place.

The work includes space-related images that stem from landscape tradition, but also photographs of people or domestic details, that, in combinations of two or three images, form landscape-like entities.

Each photograph has been taken apart from its original context through the act of combining it with other images. Thus, the photograph is transformed from a straightforward figurative description into something abstract, a part of a fictional narrative. Revolting against the ontologically documentarist nature of photography, these images provide thoughts, stories, emblems and dreams.

As I would never be able to prove with photographs ‘what really happened´, I resigned to make images that do not contain strict messages. Each work is rather formed by a jungle of signs and symbols that aim to awaken personal interpretations. Each combination of two or three photographs functions as a dialogue and the white space between the images of each set creates a blind strip of action, leaving the explanatory link invisible.