On Empty and Filled Landscapes
Thoughts and Notes – Conversations with Heli Rekula 15 and 26 October 2004. Excerpts from an interview by Kati Kivinen.
In the past few years you have been photographing landscapes instead of people. They tend to be quiet and anonymous, unburdened by unnecessary meanings. What made you shift from people to landscapes?
I have always photographed landscapes, ever since I first began taking pictures. I first exhibited land-scapes as independent works in 1998. Earlier on I had always presented them as part of some other work, such as in the triptych Pilgrimage (1996).
Making constructed and staged photos of people is quite hard work. There are so many things one must keep track of. I always feel I am holding a great responsibility, both for the work process and the finished work itself. If there are people in my landscapes, they are there as elements of the landscape itself. I'm mostly interested in the distance between myself and the people in these pictures.
As a subject, the landscape gives me a moment of respite. I live in a city where I am surrounded by a massive amount of information all the time. I find that the feeling of presence and my own existence is somehow strengthened in the silence of the landscape, it clarifies my thoughts.
You have called your landscapes "experiential notes". Are all your works memos of experiences or does this only apply to the landscapes?
To me, the landscapes are evidence of something that has already happened, of the experience that some event has preceded my note or memo, preceded the taking of the photograph. The portraits are made in a different way. The actual photo shoot is often preceded by a long planning period. In my staged portraits I use my notes and sketches to construct an image, whereas in the case of the landscapes, the pictures themselves are like notes. Perhaps all my images are both presentations and memos. But the processes and methods are completely different.
Your landscapes are a delicious combination of precision and vagueness. The pictures contain a lot of detail, but usually none of the details rise above the others. How do you find and choose your subjects? At what stage do you decide the format and cropping of the landscape picture?
Most of my landscape photographs have come about quite by chance. Shooting a photograph is never a 'calculated' thing for me. Instead I feel that I am open to a potential encounter in the landscape. I like to think of it as 'settling into the landscape'. The most important thing is the emotion or thought that makes me take the picture in the first place.
Making a work is the same as expressing that experience. When exhibiting a work, it is like asking the question, whether it is possible to convey those feelings and experiences to other people in the same way as one experienced them oneself. What interests me in these landscapes is that their elements are all equal. They don't have some object that one would look at over others. The object one looks at is the landscape itself, whatever it may contain.
The dimensions of the finished photograph, say a 75-by-180 centimetre panorama, is based on my viewing of the picture, on my own experience in front of the image. I cannot look at such a big picture all at once; I have to read it horizontally, with my eyes traversing the image. When I read a picture, I am always reminded of the moment when I was physically present in the situation that the photograph depicts. It is never the same thing. Maybe that's why the landscape photograph is a note that helps me to remember my original experience.
Kati Kivinen
Heli Rekula
DESERT
works from 1989–2004
5 Feb–24 Apr, Fifth and 4th floor
