Archive for the 'About work' Category

Local time up

Published on September 28, 2009 in 2009 photo, About work, Latvia and Riga. 0 Comments
I am attending the gallery during the two last days of the exhibition. It is raining here in Riga. Umbrellas are passing by the gallery window dragging people beneath. An hour can go before any of the umbrellas decide to take a look in. I feel a curious sympathy with gallery supervisors.
Local time 3 pm. A girl is travelling by train from France to Japan and stops in Riga and ends up in the gallery. She accepts a copy of the Survival Handbook to accompany on her 8-day journey.
On Wednesday I will close here and take the exhibition to Ventspils, to Juras Varti culture house. Opening on Friday, local time.

I am attending the gallery during the two last days of the exhibition. It is raining here in Riga. Umbrellas are passing by the window dragging people beneath. An hour can go before any of the umbrellas decide to take a look in. I feel curious sympathy with gallery supervisors.

Local time 3 pm. A girl is travelling by train from France to Japan and stops in Riga and ends up in the gallery. She accepts a copy of the Survival Handbook to accompany on her 8-day journey.

Duncker-gallery-Carousell

On Wednesday I will wrap up here and take the exhibition to Ventspils, to Jūras Vārti culture house. Opening on Friday, local time.

Vietējais Laiks – Local Time

Published on September 5, 2009 in 2009 photo, About work, Latvia and Riga. 0 Comments

Hi. Long time no see. The summer has much gone preparing for the exhibition which was opened last Thursday. Vietējais Laiks (Local Time) will be open until September 29th in Gallery Carousell in Riga old town.

vietejais-laiks-opening3

In the exhibition are shown projects Relating Latvia and If Nokia were a place… As a third, new project I published a Survival Handbook. Kārlis Vērpe wrote an essay and Zigmunds Lapsa made the design. The Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art is the publisher. In Helsinki you can obtain the book from Kiasma shop, Photograhic Gallery Hippolyte, FMP bookshop and Gallery Luova.fi which also has an online bookshop.

survival-handbook

Maanviljelijän unelma – The Farmer’s Dream

Published on May 26, 2009 in 1993 photo, About work and Finland. 0 Comments

Salo Art Museum opened their summer exhibition last Friday. Among many other artworks commenting farming, there’s a selection from Hay on The Highway – a joint project I accomplished with Yrjö Tuunanen in 1993.

duncker-hayonthehighway-k

Relating Latvia in Berlin

Published on November 23, 2008 in About work. 0 Comments

My Relating Latvia exhibition was opened last night at LCB, Berlin.

Nokia in Lapua – connecting cities

Published on October 8, 2008 in 2002 photo, 2008 photo, About work and Finland. 2 Comments

Last week my exhibition If Nokia were a place… was opened in Lapua, at Ostrobothnian Photography Centre. This is the ending for a year of touring Finnish venues. Lapua city is 200 km north from Nokia city.

Lapua is known as a make of ammunition, a bit like Nokia is known as a mobile phone brand (and was previously known as a make of rubber boots). The factory in Lapua was the primary supplier of ammunition for the Finnish army during Winter War and World War II.

In 1976 a serious accidental explosion happened at the factory, killing 40 people. After this the factory has been moved away from the city centre, and the former plant converted to a cultural centre and named as Vanha Paukku (The Old Bang / Explosive Charge). That is where my Nokia series is now hanging.

 

When I had settled in Lapua, this sweat braking mural greeted me in the chill out room of my hotel sauna: two wrestlers locked in an embrace and large caliber gun cartridges lined up along the beds of Lapua river.

Lapua sits in the South Ostrobothnia flatlands. The region has played a big bang whenever the classes have clashed. During the 1918 Civil War (while Nokia was Red) the White army stronghold was up in the flatlands. In 1929, the violent anti-communist Lapua Movement started from here, eventually aiming for a fascist rule. In 1596 the Club War, the last peasant revolt in Europe started – from South Ostrobothnia. The peasants, armed with clubs, marched the 200 km to Nokia where they were defeated a week later. The school tableau below illustrates the peasant encampment in Nokia.

 

Picture above was taken in Nokia city, 2002.

Moves in Russia

Published on September 18, 2008 in 2006 photo, About work and Russia. 0 Comments

My first moves in Russia took place in the mid 80′s when I was still in music, and our band Kadotetut (The Lost Ones) was among the first western rock groups to play in the USSR (this was roughly two years before Uriah Heep’s 1987 concert in Moscow). The train was then a great way of making it to Leningrad or Moscow. The atmosphere in the old style restaurant cars was charming, something that you could still enjoy in 2006 on a train to St. Petersburg:

Recently the Repin trains were changed to modern hardware, resulting in interiors quite as uninspiring as their Finnish counterparts.

Commuting in the large cities can be nightmarish instead, like when I was in Moscow photographing at the Millionaire Fair: the previous night’s 20-minute taxi drive took 3 hours and 40 minutes the following day. Many drivers had the nerve to start tailing ambulances wedging their way through the streets. The picture below was taken towards the end of the drive.

At the fair houses like this were on offer.

Meanwhile, in the outskirts of St. Petersburg multiple colossal suburbs were under construction.

Cairo 1990

Published on September 17, 2008 in 1990 photo, About work and Egypt. 0 Comments

I continue with publishing older travel pictures. In an earlier post I told about the disappeared color negatives. I just went through my multiple piles of quick lab copies from our student trip to Cairo in 1990.

The locally made prints are nicely tanned, but it is hard to say anything else positive about the pictures. It is disturbing to go through 15 rolls worth of images and to see that nearly all of it is rubbish. This one popped up though. It was taken at the camel market and it seems to record something about the great theatre of trading.

The course was titled Contact Photography. Our teacher Stefan Bremer said that he does not want us to bring in pictures of people’s backs. I think I took this too seriously, as I remember the sentence knocking in the back of my head for long. So I have heaps of sluggish compositions with a local fruit seller, shoe trader or meat seller grinning for the camera. When using black and white I seem to have experienced a few more moments of questioning the designated modus operandi.

Nokia in Jyväskylä

Published on September 3, 2008 in About work. 0 Comments

The Centre for Creative Photography in Jyväskylä shows my Nokia series between 28.8. and 21.9.2008.

Sofia 1990

Published on August 19, 2008 in 1990 photo, About work and Bulgaria. 0 Comments

These pictures take me even further back in time, to April 1990. We were a group of TaiK photography students on way to Cairo. We stopped in Sofia. The Bulgarian Communist Party had just released its absolute hold and was renamed The Bulgarian Socialist Party. Somewhere in the centre a group of men were reading newspaper spreads posted on billboards. One man was concentrating on the map of the country. Another man raised a vivid street talk with his one-man demonstration, claiming proper compensation for the time spent in a labor camp.

A couple of years later all my colour negatives from trips abroad disappeared from TaiK, leaving me with only a couple of rolls from Sofia. Luckily I still have some quick lab copies and b&w rolls.

Porto and Braga 1996

Published on August 13, 2008 in 1996 photo, About work and Portugal. 0 Comments

Pictures from the 1996 trip, mostly from Porto. Having rummaged through the old negatives I found that I was experimenting with some collage panoramas already then. The results however, were not interesting enough. The current experiments turn out a bit more rewarding for me (for seeing, you can browse through some of my recent posts).

Soup

Published on June 28, 2008 in About work and Latvia. 0 Comments

Previously I have been using film when photographing in Latvia. Starting from December 2007 I have gone digital (here too). Recently the Kapsede Library has set up wireless Internet. All this together makes blogging fairly easy with the only challenge being the angry geese half-way the walk. Today Maira found a good spot near the library for collecting some sort of salt weed. She cooked a splendid soup, here is the recipe:

  • salt weed from library back yard
  • quality sausage from Nakotne [Future], the former meat kolkhoz
  • potatoes of your liking
  • rice and couscous
  • dill, salt, pepper
  • Smetana (as fat as you can find). I skip this step because I can’t take dairy products.

With my stomach now full I will post a few more pictures.

To Latvia

Published on June 16, 2008 in 2007 photo, About work, Latvia and Riga. 0 Comments

On Wednesday I travel to Latvia where I will continue working on my two ongoing Baltic projects. One of them, Relating Latvia was exhibited in April in Helsinki: from this on the process will most likely begin finding a new shape. Riga often is our first stop where our family is hosted by the wonderful Vineta.

In Riga, December 2007.

A start

Published on June 15, 2008 in About work. 0 Comments

After long hesitating I started this blog. I am trying to be a photographer, not a writer. Hence, the emphasis will definitely be on pictures. This may take a shape of a visual diary, on the other hand I shall be posting older pictures as well. To help you navigate in time I’ve set up Categories by year of photography. At some point this will replace the somewhat pathetic Moves section of my actual website. But what will happen to the blog-like front page of my website titled News – I don’t know yet.