| Elina Brotherus | ||
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 Elina Brotherus was born in Finland in 1972. She lives between Helsinki and Paris. Her work deals with her own personal landscape, self-portraits, domestic ambience. Vulnerability and agoraphobia play a major role in her pictures. postmedia.net |
When I
began studying photographic art in 1995, I was still in
the middle of my university science studies. I was
strongly resistant to investigating my own emotional
life. When I finally finished my master’s
dissertation in chemistry, I guess I was able to give up
the scientific-analytical thinking required by that type
of work and to concentrate on intuition and looking. This
brought about a tremendous burst of creativity in me,
especially since I suddenly had some free time, and it is
that period that the first works that ended up in
exhibitions come from. A lot of old issues came to the
surface and I began digging into my own head, my own
history. I made Wedding Portraits (1997) when I got married, Divorce Portrait (1998) when I got divorced, and I hate sex (1998) when I felt that way. So I wasn’t showing various women’s roles, but living my life and trying to capture something genuine and real about it in the pictures. A crucial factor was a sensitivity for recognising ‘decisive moments’ and then to react quickly. The camera had to be easily accessible, often I already had it read on a tripod in the corner of the room. I did make my pictures ‘for the camera’ too, but the more unforced the photographing became, the more the presence of the camera could be ignored. I at least hoped that the pictures would rise above the personal level to become universal – over-intimate revelatory art is a bit unpleasant. That’s why I tried to keep the language ascetic and subdued: I didn’t want the pictures to scream, ‘Look, I’m unhappy, have pity on me!’ In retrospect, I have actually noticed that I reached for the camera more readily when I was unhappy. I worked the pain into a beautiful object that could be looked at detached from myself, and this consoled me a little. In a way it’s banal, but it is as if art legitimates grief. I think in this way a lot of artists make indecent use of their own unhappy lives as material for their art. read more>>> |