Postmodern photography

The exhibition of Finnish photographic art presents new, postmodern phenomena of the 1980s and the early 1990s through individual photographs. The exhibition includes a variety of works, both by photographers who work entirely within this medium and by those who use photographs as just one form of their artistic expression.

In the early 1980s, the role of the photograph underwent a fundamental change. Although the Pop Art and Conceptual Art of the 1960s and 1970s had begun to make use of photograph in artistic expression, it was in the 1980s that it was moulded into a postmodernist tool thus breaking new ground for visual artists. The objectivity of the photograph and its weight as evidence were no longer regarded as a fact. The meaning of a work and its interpretation was increasingly often bound up with the context in which it was shown and how it was displayed. Young visual artists in particular were fascinated by the way the photograph destroyed the traditional status of art and artist associated with modernism: a photograph could be copied endlessly, and its size and presentation could be altered.

The imagery of postmodern art was used to seize dominant hierarchies and historical structures of art. The artist sought both to deny and to question modernist and social values and norms. Eija-Liisa Ahtila and Maria Ruotsala among others considered values in a theoretical framework in their works, which depict sexual identities related to goods and aesthetics. They set out to unravel the clichés in advertising and mass entertainment. In her foreword to Postmoraali (Postmoral)(1992), Arja Elovirta wrote: "'Postmoral' can mean the re-evaluation of seemingly neutral moral issues; a transfer from aesthetics to society, playing with desire and power as stakes in a world which has lost its innocence. It is not essential to know whether something is good or bad, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly, normal or abnormal. It is more important to ask: By whose rules are we playing the game?"

Stefan Bremer took on the role of provocateur and expressed his opinion on social issues. By throwing himself ardently into the Helsinki nightlife of the 1980s, Bremer came to immortalise the image of the times, phenomena of the punk and rock culture in an authentic environment. Bremer became the "official" photographer of narcissistic and extreme individuals, and subcultures and marginal culture groups. In his exhibition entitled No comments, depicting disintegrating political morals, Bremer had the courage to question what could be presented and what was suitable to be talked about.

A more personal, subjective photography replaced purely documentary photography in the mid-1980s, as women begun to gain a foothold, through the feminist perspective in particular. Ulla Jokisalo abandoned traditional methods in photography by making the private and personal public and mixing the roles of photographer and photographed. The meaning of the works was to be found in the universality of basic experiences. Jokisalo built up her imagery through her inner world. Concrete starting points and motives were provided by her own childhood photo album. Symbolically charged elements, such as scissors, blood, veils, and needles and thread, also belong to her simplified yet effective imagery.

Those who had been trained in black & white documentary photography in the 1970s became the reformers of imagery and content in the 1980s. Borrowed images, computer manipulation, the use of colour, the after-treatment of negatives and staged photograph fundamentally changed photographic art. The variety of expression grew with experiments. Jorma Puranen, who often travelled to northern Lapland to photograph, took an interest in the relationship between the photograph and history. He did not, however, attempt to immortalise the northern way of life as such, as traditional documentary photography would have done. Puranen constructed the events he wanted to photograph. In his project An Imaginary Homecoming in the early 1990s, he worked with historical photographic material, namely old Sami portraits. He combined portraits from the scientific archives with the original, northern landscape. In other words, he mixed reality and the way of depicting it.

Eija Aarnio