Ismo Hollto

Thanks to Stan at Reciprocity Failure for pointing me in the direction of his favourite Finnish photographer, Ismo Hollto.

His pictures from the 1960s tie in with Esko Mannikko's themes of rural depopulation and show something of the mythical Finnish state of being mentioned in previous post. As it says on Hollto's website, "His subjects are on the verge of the end of an age of innocence and on the threshold of a new urban era. The villages in countryside were already emptying as people in the north and east were moving to the south of Finland. Many people moved to neighbouring Sweden in search of work.

The faces of Hollto's subjects emit the sadness that comes with the uncertainty of change, Vuorenmaa writes. You can often sense a concern for the future, a new kind of rootlessness in the people portrayed in Hollto's pictures. They've submitted to change, which has brought with it melancholy and longing for what's been lost. At the same time, these are still people living in a time of innocence, utopia, hope and the future."

E.O. Hoppe

An upside-down map with Australian at the top and China in the middle (with Britain a little spot on the arse of the world) - now that's just going too far!

Which leads nicely to E.O Hoppe's Australia, a book of images of Australia made by E.O.Hoppe in the 1930s. The book is a rediscovery (click on the previous link of why we don't see more of Hoppe's work) of a fantastic photographer - with images that show the raw edge of Australian life and hint at a nasty Lucky Country underbelly.




























































You can see more of Hoppe's work here, including some great portraiture from the 1920s and 1930s (including Chief White Horse Eagle, Ezra Pound, Mussolini and a Piccadilly flower seller - all pictured below).

Great Portraiture

Some ideas, including my own, on What makes a great portrait over at Conscientious.

Map of the world

The Gough Map , pictured top, is the oldest surviving road map of Britain - it was made in 1360 - but it is remarkably accurate (unless you're from Scotland or Wales - then it's not).

Phaidon published a book a few years back, called Mapping the Silk Road and Beyond which featured beautiful maps that showed how western (and eastern) understanding of the world's geography revolved around religion and commerce as much as geography. And fish featured heavily on many of the maps which is always a good thing.

The maps reveal how we see the world through what we mark on the map (trade and religion loom large here). Maps haven't changed so much since then. Through what is marked on them and how they are oriented, maps help to control the world so it becomes an abstract place devoid of human life and nature, where cities, roads and particular forms of power are given value, where scale and orientation centre the world around particular ways of thinking, which we take for granted.

There are different projections that challenge some of those ways of thinking in a geometric manner, but perhaps that geometric-logical way of thinking is part of the problem of how we understand the world and what we do to the world.



From top

The Gough Map - 1360

Barentz Map - 1595

Ash-Sharif al-Idrisi - 1150

Pedro Barreto de Resende - 1635

Esko and Nan

A little bit of background on Esko Mannikko and Finnish photography from a lecture
given by Asko Makela in Iceland a few years back.

"Esko Männikkö is a good example of a mythical Finnish man. He does not talk much. Actually he talks quite seldom - like all the men in northern Finland. There is a story of Esko Männikkö’s exhibition opening in New York where he was present. Nan Goldin comes in and asks if they could exchange an artwork. Männikkö says slowly to her: “I hate your works. I change nothing.” He has also surprised galleries by staying in Finland and going for fishing with his silent friends instead of going to the opening of his exhibition.

True or not, Esko Männikkö was the mystical man from the beginning. His success started when Peter Schjeldahl wrote an article about his works in ARS 95 to Artforum. In the article he tells that he bought one of Esko Männikkö’s work for himself, which was a quite unusual statement. On the day when Artforum came out, New York gallerists tried to find out who represents him in New York or in Finland. They smelled business. But *Esko* Männikkö did not have a gallerist and did not even talk so much and even less in English. Claes Nordenhake started then to represent him from Stocholm. Esko Männikkö was the first internationally marketed Finnish photography artist.

Esko Mannikko

Esko Mannikko is up for his retrospective exhibition, Cocktails. It shows people from Finland in their country homes ( as shown in his fabulous book, The Female Pike) , the empty houses of rural Finland, a region depopulated because of universal economic and demographic pressures along with details of the animals that live in the places where Mannikko shoots.

“I photograph because I can’t do anything else,” says Mannikko. “And I don’t have a clear mission in my mind of what I want to show. I started with people living around me and photographed these people because they are like me. They live in the country and hunt. That’s what I do, so my work is a landscape of my own soul - but what my soul is I couldn’t say.”

Mannikko will be giving a talk at The Photographers' Gallery on Friday, which has to be good. John Davies, Fazal Sheikh and Jacob Holdt will give talks in the following weeks.

John Davies

John Davies is the next nominee for the Deutsch Borse, nominated for The British Landscape exhibition. I love his work because it is so simple, direct and uncomplicated. His pictures are very familiar to me (Stockport Viaduct above is a couple of miles from my home ) and instantly recognizable. I also like him because he is a straightforward documentary photographer, something of a rare breed in the UK, and the layers of meaning in his images, the conflict between the rural and the urban reflect the layers of Davies' own life and British society as a whole.