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Me Kaksi

by Pentti Sammallahti

Photographs: Pentti Sammallahti

Text: Marie Lundquist

Publisher: Atelier EXB

Year: 2021

ISBN: 978-2-36511-302-1

Price: 50 €

Born in 1950 in Helsinki, Pentti Sammallahti, one of the greatest Finnish photographers, became interested in photography at a young age and created his first images of daily life when he was eleven. Always in B&W, his photographs are like fables, as a series like The Russian Wayattests, published in 1966 with texts by John Berger. “I always work in the same way; I travel, I don’t make any specific plans. I stop when something interests me.” Nordic landscapes, endless roads, snow-covered forests, hamlets, and vast plains bear witness to his gaze, which is both contemplative and intensely connected to the natural world.

After teaching in the 1970s at the Lahti Art School followed by the Helsinki School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Sammallahti became a full-time photographerin the 1990s and since then undertakesseveral photographic voyages around the world. He has published around 40 books and his work is part of the collections of the MoMA in New York, the Stedeljik Museum in Amsterdam, the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, among other institutions. He is represented in France by Galerie Camera Obscura and in the US by the galleries Nailya Alexander and Peter Fetterman.

Inspired by the title of a poem by the Finnish writer Aaro Hellaakoski, Me Kaksi (which translates to 'we two' in French) celebrates the fortuitous encounter, the strange closeness, the presence in the world of two beings. The photographs in this book reproduce these fleeting moments captured on the sly by Pentti Sammallahti. The idea of the duo, the couple, of all kinds of accomplices appears recurrently in the photographer's work. Whether it is lovers, friends, children, passers-by, travelers, neighbors but also a man and his dog, two birds ... Sammallahti's images tell of the attachment, the tenderness, the emotional bond, 'being-in-the-world' together.

A look at more than forty years of wanderings around the world, the photographs in this book are so many little haikus: they celebrate the evanescence of things, fragments of encounters, unexpected, fortuitous, exceptional intimacy but also sometimes of powerful evidence.

More books by Pentti Sammallahti

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look inside

Me Kaksi

by Pentti Sammallahti

Photographs: Pentti Sammallahti

Text: Marie Lundquist

Publisher: Atelier EXB

Year: 2021

ISBN: 978-2-36511-302-1

Price: 50 €

Born in 1950 in Helsinki, Pentti Sammallahti, one of the greatest Finnish photographers, became interested in photography at a young age and created his first images of daily life when he was eleven. Always in B&W, his photographs are like fables, as a series like The Russian Wayattests, published in 1966 with texts by John Berger. “I always work in the same way; I travel, I don’t make any specific plans. I stop when something interests me.” Nordic landscapes, endless roads, snow-covered forests, hamlets, and vast plains bear witness to his gaze, which is both contemplative and intensely connected to the natural world.

After teaching in the 1970s at the Lahti Art School followed by the Helsinki School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Sammallahti became a full-time photographerin the 1990s and since then undertakesseveral photographic voyages around the world. He has published around 40 books and his work is part of the collections of the MoMA in New York, the Stedeljik Museum in Amsterdam, the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, among other institutions. He is represented in France by Galerie Camera Obscura and in the US by the galleries Nailya Alexander and Peter Fetterman.

Inspired by the title of a poem by the Finnish writer Aaro Hellaakoski, Me Kaksi (which translates to 'we two' in French) celebrates the fortuitous encounter, the strange closeness, the presence in the world of two beings. The photographs in this book reproduce these fleeting moments captured on the sly by Pentti Sammallahti. The idea of the duo, the couple, of all kinds of accomplices appears recurrently in the photographer's work. Whether it is lovers, friends, children, passers-by, travelers, neighbors but also a man and his dog, two birds ... Sammallahti's images tell of the attachment, the tenderness, the emotional bond, 'being-in-the-world' together.

A look at more than forty years of wanderings around the world, the photographs in this book are so many little haikus: they celebrate the evanescence of things, fragments of encounters, unexpected, fortuitous, exceptional intimacy but also sometimes of powerful evidence.

More books by Pentti Sammallahti

more books tagged »black and white« | >> see all

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