7/28/2019 Pentti Sammallahti Exhibition Text

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GALLERY

PENTTI

SAMMALLAHTI

For the beauty of his image making, for his darkroom craftsmanship, for his constant innovation in

print and publication, Pentti Sammallahti has become a benchmark gure in Finnish photography.

Describing himself as a wanderer, he likes the nature of the great north, the silence, the cold, the

sea, but whether in Scandinavia, Finland, Estonia, Russia, or elsewhere, he is drawn to the margins

and records the relationships of people and animals to their environments.

Sammallahtis photographs take the viewer into and beyond everyday experience. There is a gentle

humour in his universe - the dogs stretching, the birds balancing a branch, a vulture looming over a

sleeping gure. He represents an alternative to the frenetic rhythms of contemporary life and to the

adulation of rapid change, but each photograph invites the viewer into something deeper a teasingout of the narrative through its smallest details.

There is a shamanistic sense of what Cartier-Bresson called the decisive moment, caught in and

taken out of time; a world in part revealed by the animals, which wander in and out of the images.

His use of dogs, in particular, whilst commenting on human experience, challenges mans claim for

centrality in a vision of an earth, which, by its nature, must be shared. It is a vision inseparable from

the precision in the moment of capture and the meticulous craftsmanship of each print.

He is also known as a passionate seeker of the perfect (mechanical) printing method. His own

innovative techniques and the reintroduction of the portfolio form have re-awakened broader interest

in published photographic art in Finland. As a craftsman, Sammallahti has taken the tradition of

the artist book forward, creating individual works in which the photographer is responsible for the

whole: the original images, the making of prints, layout, design and typography, reproduction and

often the actual printing process. He has inuenced and taught a whole generation of documentary

photographers in Finland.

This exhibition draws extensively on The Russian Way, his largest single body of work, which was

published as a portfolio in 1996. That selection is complemented by work from his travels throughout

Europe, Africa and Asia.

18.02.12 - 14.04.12

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