Point of View

"Happyland is a kind of a sanctuary, one's own world within the world, the place which you feel good entering. I photographed people, folk artists that fill their yards with statues, with pictures of animals and people, pictures of memories, a time long gone, when everything was better than now. The Happyland I found photographing these people is a fairytale land, a magic that stops time. Happyland is never finished, most people keep on building it as long as they can hold their tools."

VELI GRANÖ

But just as the camera shutter clicks, a snake crawls into Happyland. The series of photographs was reaching for the innocence of its subjects, but ran instead into the snake hissing the discordant tunes of the post-modern. Proudly, the suddenly famous backyard artists pose among their work through the entire exposure time of two seconds, blissfully ignorant of the fact that from now on, the problems of the post-modern photography would be the problems of their own portraits, recorded on film.

A window on art

Through the entire 1980s, photography struggled to be accepted as an art form along with the others. The battle demanded more and more new evidence of the artistic input of the photographer; the definition "a photograph is a window onto reality" acquired the reputation of a four-letter word. Treatment was used on the picture without care; composition and other requirements familiar from painting were followed; or maybe the photographer dove deep into his own world of emotions and experience. Granö says that the characteristic quality of photography was forgotten; that the photographer had stepped in front of his own picture, and nobody cared what the picture showed. Nevertheless, the photograph had learned to lie so well that reality started becoming interesting again, and new documentarism raised its head.

For Veli Granö, Happyland was a manifesto of what photography should be like. Granö wanted to show that a photograph in itself is a powerful means of expression: "My three-year journey into the world of folk art did not diminish my faith in the discernment of naïve and direct experience. The battle against the demands of the environment, prejudice, and norms became the motivation for my own work. Despite the diversity of the motifs of a folk artist, I perceive their art, too, as struggling towards the logical goal of self-expression: to define its maker."

The real and original experience, which Granö pursues, does not transport itself as such into an art museum. The gigantic statues of the backyard artists, originally made to be a more powerful and life-like means of expression than a photograph, when printed, return to pictures that are looked at in the twilight of the gallery, while dreaming of the simplicity of Happyland. But not even the biggest Kekkonen statue in Finland, or Hanna Korhonen's concrete animals that have managed to fool even their living counterparts, can fool the post-modern viewer. The viewer, inured by the daily flood of imagery, cannot forget that a post-modern photograph is not a window onto reality, but a consciously composed presentation of a selected reality.

Granö's first contact with folk art was the local village artist's gorilla mailbox and a mermaid statue lounging in the yard; they made a lasting impression on him. But when he commenced the execution of the photography book and exhibition of these backyard artists, he systematically sought his subjects through newspaper ads. His goal was to discover the primal root of creating an image, and the ultimate function of art. While he toured among the folk artists, he paid several visits to their homes, and the picture was never taken on the first visit. On that occasion they would talk about the artist's first work, for example, and the motives for making them in the first place. The answers were general: solitude, sorrow, re-enacting and rebuilding great experiences, or using the statues to create a connection over the back-yard hedge.

Finally, when on his tours Granö felt it was time for the shooting session, he would dig out his old bellows camera, and disappear under the black hood himself. The bellows camera and the two seconds exposure time made the shooting event peaceful and dignified. On wide-format film, you can catch so many things and details that the viewer forgets the role of the photographer altogether, and concentrates on his own observations. The sharpness of the image, the colours, and the perspective further emphasise the impression of the photograph being a window onto reality.

The changing reality

As he returned to his boyhood art experiments in his series, Granö noticed that the statues of this fairyland had acquired new meaning. They exhibited their makers' loneliness, the palpable power of fantasies, and personal tragedy. And the narration didn't limit itself to the life stories of the individuals; the photographer was just as likely to find his subject the concrete reincarnation of the cattle herd swept away by the structural change in society. The reality of a photograph was a way to create a just image of the folk artist in an environment created by himself. The person's relation to his environment was the essential issue. Creating the right impression involved moving the statues round, handling heavy photography equipment, and mastering a technique that produces realistic enough imagery. The Happyland pictures give the impression that the photographer had no role in what the camera catches, but the photographer was needed even to create that impression.

The pictorial reality is in a constant process of change: who will get the attention, in what context, and what, all in all, do the viewers want to see? In the late 80s and early 90s, new documentarism sought its targets from the margins of life, thus leaving behind the educational attitude and partiality of the past decades' documentary photography. The new photograph does not just interpret meaning, it creates new meaning. For some Happyland artists, becoming the subject of the pictures meant a turning point in the attitudes of their environment, and a final encouragement into a conscious decision on becoming an artist. The innocence preserved on the film, and the spontaneity of creating may well have ended at the moment the camera shutter clicked. The folk artists that Granö met have also had to face the question "Whose reality?" in relation to their own production. One sculptor had to bury his naked statues of Adam and Eve in the yard, since his neighbours couldn't stand them. Another man cut off the neck of his giraffe, and changed it to a moose, when the villagers started saying that there had never been giraffes in the neighbourhood before.

Jyrki Simovaara

Point of View is based on interviews with Veli Granö, and Arja Elovirta's articles on the modern history of photography.