Jaakko Heikkilä: Silent talks

"Met olema kaikin yhtä ja sammaa taivaallista sakia." /"We're all one and the same heavenly crowd"

Jaakko Heikkilä's (b. 1956) extensive retrospective shows the work of this renowned romantic photographer, whose work combines curiosity and skilled observation with a warm, empathic approach. Telling stories together, or "poriseminen" (chin-wagging), as they say in Heikkilä's home region of the Torne River Valley, is fundamental to his way of working and creating contact with those he is photographing.

He began working as a photographer in the 1990s, as an interpreter of the cultural scene in the Torne River Valley on the border of Finland and Sweden, with the series Meänmaa (Land of Ourn) and Kirkas nöyryys (Bright Humility). Ever since then, he and his camera have roamed various parts of the world, photographing among Northern-Swedish Finnish-speakers, Russia's Pomorišje, Armenians, Serbian Vlachs and the residents of New York's Harlem. The most recent themes are the palaces of the Venetian nobility that are closed to outsiders.

In Heikkilä's case a window onto the world has opened for Finnish contemporary photography in an exceptional way, via a powerfully local identity. The characteristics of his home region as a border zone have dictated the direction of his photographing trips. The population groups in his pictures, who have all been caught up in change in one way or another, are often comparable to the Finnish-speaking minority on the Swedish side of the Torne River Valley, who have been campaigning for the rights of meänkieli speakers since the 1980s.

The photographs show situations in people's everyday lives, both joy and caring for each other, and loneliness and sorrow, and yet in his works Heikkilä does not dramatically point the finger at the injustices of the world. His pictures frequently contain a dash of nostalgia for a lost reality, and a contemplation of the miracle of being in the world. In them we tread the boundary line between heaven and earth, as in the panorama pictures that are so important to Heikkilä. His work is a homage to people's right to exist as they are.

After Helsinki, the exhibition will go on, for instance, to Germany (Stadtgalerie Kiel), Estonia (Tallinn Art Hall) and Sweden (Kulturens Hus, Luleå) in 2011-2012. The retrospective is accompanied by the publication of a book of photographs Silent Talks (publisher Kehrer). The exhibition has been curated by the art historian Ritva Röminger-Czako.