A look at Elina Brotherus - The New Painting

Le Printemps, 2001

Elina Brotherus, born 1972, Helsinki, Finland is an artist that I keep a close eye on, just to see what new material she is creating. For me, the work she has continued to produce over the past decade and longer have been more than exceedingly good, putting her in the forefront of contemporary artists working with photography. 

I was first exposed to Brotherus’s The New Painting (2000-2004) series, work that really does force the viewer to analyse the photograph in front them in the way you would do a painting. Brotherus’s says this about the work ‘Photography is the new painting, said my friend Edda Jonsdottir, director of i8 gallery in Reykjavik. With this somewhat provocative sentence in mind in June 2000 I start my still on going series, “The New Painting”. I use contemporary means of expression (large format colour photography), but I owe a lot to the aesthetics of classical figurative painting. With the camera I try to approach the same problems that painters have been dealing with for centuries: light, colour, composition figures, in space, projection of the three-dimensional in the two-dimensional. I find these questions fundamental in all visual arts.’ (Elina Brotherus, 2001)

Der Wanderer 3, 2003

Elina Brotherus is known for including herself as the model in her photographs. Older works focused more on the inclusion of her in the photographs, the emphasis on self-portraiture, identity and the problem with representing oneself. Again she is seen within the photograph but she describes that it now presents this person (often times her) as ‘an object of investigation, not for the inner properties but for the external ones. The person in the picture is a model, in the same sense as painters have been using models.’ She questions how figures interact with space and with each other, and how light reveals the body form.

The next extract is from Elina Brotherus’s website, where she discusses what has motivated her to produce The New Painting.

The colours of a photographic print are not given; the “correct” answer is not hidden in the negative. It is surprise how much can be done in the darkroom. Chosen the colour of the sky can be just as arbitrary as choosing among pigments of oil paint. This came like a revelation to me when working on the The New Painting. All there is, is a vague impression of “how it was” on the location, and a choice that has to be made by the artist when printing. This is why I have started to take notes, in the spirit of Bonnard, in order to remember what things looked like.

Photography, unlike painting, has a direct link to the reality. This is both its enchantment and its curse. People tend to treat photographs as documents: who is this person, or where is that place? I would prefer that we pay more attention, not only to the subject matter itself, but to how it is shown: what visual choices has the artist made, how has he/she solved certain problems, what is the structure of the image, the mood of it, how are the colours tuned? How does it affect us as viewers?

• Elina Brotherus 2006

I am attracted to the work of Elina Brotherus, for one, the images are visually pleasing, they open your eyes to what she is trying to portray, and she also understands the loss of power and control to the audience. Her work searches for the beauty in the landscape just as paintings did/do and it establishes the photograph as a valuable art form, very much like Wolfgang Tillmans valuing the photographs place within the museum. 

Der Wanderer 4, 2003

Nu Endormi, 2003

Der Wanderer 5, 2003

I was very interested in the way Brotherus worked portraiture and the focus on body form into the landscape with care on beauty and pose. When I had begun working on the work now called Transient Bodies, my motives were based on the relationship with the individual and the landscape as one, but it tried to connect the too to make this aesthetically pleasing image that opted to consider the beauty of landscape photography such as the works of Ansel Adams and the portraiture of Bill Brandt. 

Der Wanderer 2

Der Wanderer, 2003

Orage Montant, 2003

Very Low Horizon, 2001

Broken Horizon, 2001

Figure au Bord de L’eau, 2002

There is so much beauty in this photograph to read from, the beauty of the landscape, the beauty of the figure. You want to know what he is looking towards, what has brought him to this raw unmanufactured landscape. I had not seen this image before I started to work on ideas of my own, but this would have certainly inspired the work I wanted to produce. It is inspiring me right now in fact, such beauty and craft.

Baigneuse de Saturnia, 2003

All images shown here are taken from Elina Brotherus's book The New Painting, all copyright goes to the artist and publishers, if you are interested in Elina Brotherus and the work she produces visit her website here

Esko Männikkö

Esko Männikkö (b. 1959, Finland) has been nominted for his retrospective Cocktails 1990-2007 shown at Millesgarden, Stockholm, Sweden (1 September - 4 November 2007).

Born in the small town of Pudasjarvi in the northern part of Finland between the forests of Lapland and rural eastern Bothnia, Esko Männikkö documents the lives of those who inhabit the periphery. Initially a hunter, his passion developed from this to taking photographs in the early 1980’s. When Time Stops Still (1982), his first project, was a series of black and white portraits of a family continuing to survive without electricity on the outskirts of his village.

Männikkö then became widely known for The Female pike (!990-1995), which featured colour photographs of bachelors living isolated lives in the Finnish countryside - forestry workers, hunters, fishermen and the jobless - alongside still-life studies, panoramic landscapes and portraits. In this series, as well as the more recent work Mexas (1999), produced on the border between Mexico and Texas, his sitters are depicted in an informal manner within their personal domestic settings. Often surrounded by home-made objects, they are quiet and reserved, each photograph instilled with the peculiarities and unique characteristics of the individual,

Other projects include Organized Freedom (1999-2005), where Männikkö focuses in detail on the battered front doors and porches of abandoned country cottages marking their slow corrosion by the forces of nature. This melancholic but beautiful sense of deterioration returns in series such as Flora & Fauna (2002), and his most recent and ongoing series, Harmony Sisters (2005-), taken in farms and zoos around the world, where abstract photographs of animals are rendered as still-lifes.

Männikkö presents his photographs in assorted found or hand-made wooden frames, weather and aged by time, butted up closely together - his trademark style of exhibiting his work. The faded glamour of the frames acts as a stark contrast to the boldness and immediacy of his photographs but also lends them a timeless, almost painterly quality.

“I am a photographer of fish, dogs and old men”, Esko Männikkö once said. Interested in bringing to attention small stories which might carry a more universal poignancy, Männikkö shows us a world where animals, objects and people are all portrayed and treated with the same mutual respect and childlike wonder. 

In 1995, Esko Männikkö was awarded The Young Artist of the Year Award by Tampere Art Museum, Finland. His books have included Mexas - Esko Männikkö (1999), The Female Pike (2000, to be republished in 2008) and 100% Cashmere (2003). Solo exhibitions include Portikus, Frankurt am Main (1996); White Cube, London (19997); Kursaal, San Sebastian (2006) and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York (2006). His retrospective Cocktails 1990-2007 is currently touring across Europe. Esko Männikkö’s work is included in numerous museum collections. He lives and works in Oulu.

Extract taken from Deutsche Börse photography prize, Published London : Photographers' Gallery 2008

Photographs by Esko Männikkö, from the Deutsche Börse photography prize book, Published London : Photographers' Gallery 2008

Thomas Struth

I have recently been directed toward the work of German photographer Thomas Struth. Just because my recent ideas found themselves lurking in to the psychological path of Struth’s work. I found this particularly interesting, during an interview given in 1988, Struth is asked to reply to a statement that describes his work “as political and social” : “Certainly, even if not, of course, in a direct manner. As far as my work on urban space is concerned, it is political and social in the sense I described before, of an analysis and a synthesis of our way of living in this society. But, I also think that my interest in portraiture, which I started to make 5 years ago, works in that direction, as a sort of testimony to people living in our age.”

Thomas Struth’s work is a testimony that ‘us’ photographers are researchers. This next extract is from James Lingwood’s Composure [or on being Still] text on Thomas Struth.

Thomas Struth’s photographs over the past 20 years constitute a sustained and concentrated inquiry into the ethics and aesthetics of seeing. Struth’s research is not motivated solely by an interest in what we can see - the surfaces of places, people and paintings - important though the subjects of his photographs are to him. He is equally preoccupied with the question of the way that we see. Because the way that we see, the manners and the models of seeing, are a powerful signifier or our social being, of the way that we are, with ourselves and with others; of the way that we negotiate our relations with people around us, with ‘Strangers and Friends’, to return to the title of an earlier book of Struth’s.

Taken from STILL by Thomas Struth

Thomas Struth has been that artist that I have always admired (from a distance), however it is only now that I feel it has become more relevant to me. With the work I am doing now and the project I am lining up to run straight off of it, I find my own mentality comparing to Struth’s.

Here are a few photographs from his portraits that analyse families. 

Eija-Liisa Ahtila

To begin, what connects me with Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s work are the themes she explores, the methodology of her practice and what drives her to create the work she does. Simply because, they are things I have begun to notice in myself.

Born in Hämeenlinna, Finland in 1959, Ahtila’s work takes on themes such as, love, sexuality, identity, jealousy, anger, vulnerabilit, and reconciliation. She has continued to explore these powerful emotions that underly human relationships throughout her career, and her work has been described (by herself) as ‘human dramas’. Ahtila creates fictional narratives from lengthy periods of research as well as from her own observations and experiences. The process of emotional reconciliation is a recurrent motif: her characters move between past and present without relying on a conventional cinematic 'flashback'. In recent work, the border between 'self' and 'other' is investigated as the viewer is invited to peer inside the minds of individuals caught in moments of psychological fragility.

Elija-Liisa Ahtila, Laugh, 2000

from the Assitant Series, 27 x 73 in. (69 x 186.5cm) framed

Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Closed Door, 2000

from the Assistant Series, 27 x 73 in. (69 x 186.5 cm) framed

Eija-Liisa Ahtila, View, 2000
from the Assistant Series, 24 x 68 in. (61 x 172.5) framed

She is very much concerned with the language of film-making. There are three elements that she views as central to her work: the way images are constructed, the way narrative unfolds, and the physical space in which the work is encountered. She is interested in how film and video are absorbed into our everyday worlds, and many of her works adopt the techniques of contemporary media, from music videos, commercials, cinema trailers to documentary film. Some of the films are shown on multiple screens, or within complex installations that require the viewer to navigate their way through the space. Others are as likely to be encountered in a cinema or on television as in a gallery setting.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila, House, 2000
from the Assistant Series, 24 x 68 in. (61 x 172.5 cm) framed

Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Support, 2000
from the Assistant Series, 27 x 73 in. (69 x 186.5 cm) framed

Eija-Liisa Ahtila currently works in Helsinki.

Future Work? and Tania Bruguera

There has been quite a bit of an uproar throughout the past year in Great Britain. In terms of the government, the economy, communities - social integration - immigration, and patriotism.

More notably with the riots (riots that evolved in to looting) that spread from London right up the country to other cities such as Bristol, Birmingham and Manchester. Some said that the outbreak was predictable and it was only a matter of time before the growing tension and impatience with the British government reached its limit. 

What has made me talk about this, as with everything, you take in what your environment gives you, during the period of the riots there were journalist holding brief interviews with the public, and with the people carrying out the looting. During one interview a reporter asks the question to a Salford man in his thirties (who obviously didn’t give two shits about anything and saw it as a keen opportunity to get away with senseless looting) “why have you got to do it?” to which he responded “why? Because you’re letting all the polish, all the ... everyone in our country, letting everyone do our jobs, and we can’t get no jobs.”

A few months later “My Tram Experience” was uploaded on to youtube. A racial outburst by a drunken caucasian woman on a busy South London tram. Through the length of the video she attacks various ethnical minorities in what was some kind of ‘defense’ for her England. “Loads of black people, and loads of fucking Polish”

I guess what has me linking the two videos together and what has triggered some form of response from me is the fact that both if these racially aggravated videos not only attack people of colour who have migrated to this country, not just in our generations but generations before, but it attacks people of Polish decent.

I have quite a few friends here in Manchester, some live in the city centre, others on the outskirts such as Salford, and Droylsden, and through the ones I speak to on this matter they tell me what a racist city it is. The mention the casual demeaning responses they receive when a person detects their accent. Which is incredibly sad, especially as we are now in 2012.

I think subconsciously my mind has been thinking about this quite a bit, and it is not as if I look at these situations through a secondary position and assume I know what it feels like. I am an ethnical minority myself. I have experienced first hand racism in such instances. First hand and second hand racism are very different experiences. Almost like the contrast between sympathy and empathy.  

Anyway I had been thinking about this in terms of work form. With the methodology not far off the work of portraits I am doing now. Perhaps with influences from such artist’s as Eija Liisa Ahtila and Elina Brotherus. Then earlier this week reading through the January - February 2012 issue of Freize magazine, I came across Tania Bruguera, an artist involved in a long-term project in New York, called the Immigrant Movement International. A project that doesn’t set out to represent politics but creates political situations. 

Bruguera, a Cuban artist who lives and works in Queens, New York defines her work as ‘Behaviour Art’. To which she aims to create art that actively inhabits cultural, political and social power structures, in an attempt to influence, rather than represent, them.

So, like with many things in the artistic world there are artists that have done what you intend to do and you might not know it, however I believe I’m going to continue with this train of thought. It is all still very staggered with no acute ending. Besides we work on different mediums!

Artist Statement 2.0

       Moving on from my previous work that explored themes of young male adulthood, and the physical form of body entwined within the landscape, I have now begun exploring ideas that work with and advance my own personal interests, in relationships, intimate connections, passion, trust, truth enclosure and openness. I also believe that this exploration is just as much a personal learning experience to my subjects as it will be to me. 

I have been motivated to carry out this practice work from previous experiences and the focus comes from where my own life is at the moment, the people that surround it, the relationships built and the ones lost, the obstacles and trials and other moments. There is no desire to focus on the form of the body, but the chance to be able to observe human life, and communication, to take note of opinions on areas such as monogamy, protection, ownership, censorship through male, female, old and young, and different sexual orientations. 

Through this process - which is almost like an informal ‘interview’ – In away I am psychological and mental stripping away the personal barriers placed, but also being allowed inside those barriers just for that moment.

Though, this is a single portrait, it is the perfect example of the framing involved when focusing on each couple.

Methodology 

I’ll be working to a strict methodology inspired by the likes of,

• David Bailey (Bailey’s Democracy)
• Rineke Dijkstra 
• Hellen van Meene
• Koos Breukel (Studio Portraits)
• Richard Kern (Couples / Class Portraits)
• Wolfgang Tillmans

Working with the 6x7 medium format, portraits take place inside my home and inside the studio.

Individual Portraits – Studio (Non-place)

Couple Portraits – Home (Place)

Reasons for the individual portraits are to look in to the person when their partner is no longer around, to see their personal character.

The Outcome

• A series of images with no differentiation other than the people inside them
• A realised relationship between me and each couple and individual