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Jari Silomaki - Research Residencies

Jari Silomaki – Small Epiphanies In A Big World

In both The Weather Diaries and his new project My Unopened Letters, Jari Silomäki tackles two photographic idioms which dominated the mid 19th century – narrative tableau and travel photography. The coexistence of two such apparently unconnected bodies of work in Silomäki’s oeuvre is not all that surprising. In the last century, the exploration of the physical world by celebrated pioneers such as Roger Fenton, John Thomson, Carleton Watkins and Francis Frith developed in parallel with the emergence of ‘art photography’ – the constructed tableaux of Henry Peach Robinson and Oscar Reijlander where the explicit intent was to construct an artificial reality, a fiction based on a loose (often moral) tale. A sense of the ‘grand project’ – the long-term production of an extensive photographic archive or the serial instalments of major literary works favoured by 19th century novelists such as Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens - also links Silomäki’s work to that of his predecessors.
In his Weather Diaries – an ongoing series which the artist intends to complete only after a period of ten years – Silomaki creates an archive of images in which personal and public histories coexist. Employing his camera as a diaristic tool, a sequence of images (one per day) records a geographical place or scene where the artist has been, which is then accompanied by a short hand-written text recounting a significant private or public event that happened on that particular day. As in a written diary, unguarded private emotions, such as an argument with a friend sit side by side with incidents of global significance. Silomäki’s employment of a systematic, archival approach neutralises the significance of the ‘major events’, allowing the personal to carry as much weight as the public. Unlike his 19th century forebears, however, the images – recording the artist’s whereabouts, be they in his homeland of Finland, or travelling in Australia, Europe or Britain - seem less to concentrate on a sense of place (some indeed would be unrecognisable without the accompanying text) than to convey a particular mood or atmosphere. This is not to discount, however, the considerable deliberation which has gone into the construction and editing of the final selection of images, which belies the viewer’s initial impression that these small epiphanies are simply spontaneous, unmediated responses to daily events.
Whilst recent photography has thrown up many examples of artists who use the camera to disclose their private lives (Annelies Strba, Elina Brotherus, Jurgen Teller), what is refreshing about Silomäki's combination of image and text is the unassuming way in which the prosaic and the poetic coexist. The personal and public, the explicit and implicit, memory and imagination, prose and poetry, lie at the heart of Silomäki’s work and link the work in the two series.

A more insistent exploration of the narrative possibilities of photography is suggested in the title of Silomäki’s new series My Unopened Letters. Within both literature and photography the idea of the (unopened) letter as a metaphor for what is withheld by the narrator, its sense of inherent mystery anticipation and promise, has been a recurrent motif. Taking their cue from both Dutch 18th century painters as well as their contemporaries, the PreRaphaelites, mid 19th century photographers such as Peach Robinson often employed the image of a woman reading a letter as a narrative device to suggest an emotional and temporal world existing outside the image. Here Silomäki turns this genre on its head by proposing a new idea – a series of unopened letters, the archive of which forms the basis for the introductory image. Carefully stored on library shelves and annotated according to sender, the archive begins with those sent to the narrator some 40 years ago (which now appear as discoloured, yellowing envelopes) and proceeds, slowly but surely, down the course of several decades, concluding with the recently postmarked, crisp, white letters. On studying the archive, the status and identity of the narrator remains ambiguous – not only because some of the letters have been sent by the artist “J Silomaki” but because he (ostensibly) also appears in some of the images in the work.

The accompanying images in the first ‘chapter’ of this ‘photo-narrative’ – which to date comprises 60 images - realise some of the possible or imagined events within the letters. Here, we glimpse fragments and incidents such as encounters with strangers, arguments with neighbours, exchanges with family members - the small epiphanies which constitute the emotional texture of contemporary life. Either as a fictional character of his own creation or as the photographer himself, the stories relate in some way to that of a photographer towards the end of his life – someone who is looking back, perhaps nostalgically or with regret and wants to reconfigure his life through memory and imagination. Some of the emotional energy involved in reconstructing these events is vividly reflected in the fabric and structure of the images – in the torn ‘found’ photographs which have been lovingly sellotaped together again, and in the softly lit, out-of-focus images reflecting the casual, untutored eye of the amateur photographer.

Unlike so many of his contemporaries who attempt to distill narrative into a single image through the strategy of the constructed tableau, Silomaki pursues a far less well-trodden route. Instead of the rhetoric of the grand tableau, we are offered intimately-scaled ‘photographic paragraphs’ which propose that various narratives can exist at the same time, that photographic narratives are multi-layered and can even be ‘author-less’. Silomaki’s achievement is in finding new ways to explore old conundrums. His interests lie not just in creating convincing images, but in speculating about how truth and fiction operate in photography and finding inventive ways to reposition the photographer as ‘author’ in meta-narrative.

Brett Rogers
Director
The Photographers Gallery
November 2005.

This essay was written for the exhibition catalogue.