Past exhibitions

Food is not just a simple, basic commodity used to satisfy hunger. This year, the Festival of Political Photography will present images that highlight the political, social and environmental dimensions of food.

In the spring of 2016, the Finnish Museum of Photography, in cooperation with the study programme of museology at the University of Helsinki and the Festival of Political Photography, implemented a project that collected photographs by asylum seekers who had recently arrived in Finland, as well as memories and stories related to these photographs.

Elis Hoffman photographed the series Fading in small rural towns around Sweden during five summers in 2010–2014. He travelled to places he had never been to, meeting people he had not met before. Hoffman captured these encounters in photographs that depict tenderness and vulnerability, expressing the photographer’s sincere curiosity towards life.

Images of urbanisation, industrialisation and the emergence of consumer culture and the welfare state – the familiar 20th century story of the upheavals of Finnish society. This time, however, the vantage point is that of the working class. We see work and workers move from villages to cities, from…

An American photographer, Magnum photojournalist, Instagrammer and self-publisher – Alec Soth (b. 1969) is one of the most talked about photographers of the 2010s. The exhibition Gathered Leaves brings together the four major works that brought Soth to the forefront worldwide. 

What makes a good food photograph? You need soft, natural light, raw materials or a plate of food, a little composition and a steady hand. And to view the food, a lens, which nowadays most often means a mobile phone or a tablet. This was the basis for our cooking and photography course. The course…

While living in the United States in 1980–1981, Pirkko Tanttu (b. 1946) carried her camera with her wherever she went. She photographed often and in large quantities, striving to capture fleeting moments of the hustle and bustle of city life. The majority of the pictures were taken in Philadelphia, where Tanttu lived with her partner, and in New York during their numerous trips to the city.

Finnish design had its heyday in the 1950s. Successful designers had a trusted go-to photography partner in Finland: the Pietinen family business and, in particular, the brothers Otso and Matti Pietinen. They were the ones who took photographs of the internationally recognised designs by, for example, Timo Sarpaneva, Tapio Wirkkala, Nanny Still, Kaj Franck and Saara Hopea.

In Andrey Bogush's (born in 1987) photographic installations, the materiality of the photographs is part of both the digital and the physical space. Bogush records his own life by taking fragmentary diary snapshots. He processes the photographs using photo-editing software – adding elements and unnatural colours, and blurring decisive moments – which serves to disrupt the representational nature of the photographs.

A group of nursing home residents, along with their loved ones, share stories and pictures of their personally significant places. Places of Life are locations where a person has experienced something joyful or exhilarating, something truly memorable.

The photographic artist Taneli Eskola's (b. 1958) work weaves a tapestry of space and time – images of snowy landscapes, street life, gardens and urban havens. Eskola has always observed his immediate living environments, including the Hämeenlinna of the 1980s and the old Malmi district in Helsinki. During his travels, he has captured scenes in the former Soviet Union, Estonia, Poland and Italy.

Why do the words ”home” and ”land” sound and feel good, but ”homeland” refers to something restricted, nationalistic, and even prejudiced? What are nationalistic feelings all about? “Homeland” is the theme of the 2016 Festival of Political Photography. During the festival, the theme will be…

For 18 months, Kaisa Rautaheimo has photographed men in their 20s going "through a phase": some have dropped out of education, others have never started their studies. Working life seems distant. The boys hope to find something meaningful, but they don’t know where to look for it, what to look for, and why.Rautaheimo wanted to look at these men as individuals, to hear their voices and see their everyday personal lives.

Pimiö – Darkroom, lets the viewers to immerse themselves in the fascinating reality of the darkroom – experientially, through all their senses. The exhibition looks both at the history of photography and the current buzz around darkrooms and traditional techniques. Works by more than 60 photographers, spanning from the 19th century to 2015, demonstrate the versatility of the techniques and the changing ideals of photographic printing.

From coffee mugs with cute cat photos to t-shirts with holiday snapshots: applying photographs to everyday objects is so common that the phenomenon is often left unnoticed. In a brand-new series of photographs, the Swiss-Danish artist duo PUTPUT brings these photographic objects to new, insightful…

Secret Agent is a group exhibition composed from the viewpoint of feminist authorship and forms of collaboration in contemporary photography and film making practices. The six artists in the exhibition actively challenge the institutional structure of history and patriarchal authority – and imagine alternative narratives through the specificity of lens-based media.

The retrospective exhibition on Hannele Rantala (b.1952), The End of the Wonderful Times, will comprise works dating between 1975 and 2015 and will offer a comprehensive overview of Rantala's 40-year career as an artist. Many of the works in the exhibition are having their debut showing in Finland.

In the exhibition Reinterpreting the Frame, new artworks are shown together with their inspirational origins. The roots of these works by five young Finnish artists go back to old archival images from the Museum’s collections.

The first exhibition of the festival of political photography (PVF) will present series from seven photographers from around the world who all want to make statements about social issues they find important. Most of the series are being shown in Finland for the first time.

A photographic artist, researcher, photojournalist, teacher, and developer of artistic research – the extensive influence of Leena Saraste (born 1942) on Finnish photography cannot be overstated.

Family Album features a series of family portraits with children from divorced families. The main character of each photograph is a child whose parents have divorced. The children have invited everyone they feel belongs to their family to join in the portrait. They have also arranged the family members as they have seen fit.

The series In the Playroom brutally shows that it is hard to build a protective bubble around children. Hobin's works often deal with the darker aspects of childhood and incorporate references to cinema, history or popular culture. Children act out September 11 and re-enact the Abu-Ghraib torture scene, as publicised by the media. A little girl, wearing a plastic tiara, sits, with knees bleeding, in front of a boy, dressed as a reporter.

The Internet has fundamentally changed photography. Never in history have people created so many photographs to such vast and immediate audiences as today. Never before has the individual snapshot taken by ordinary men and women had such global political impacts. Photographs have become integral in…

Everyday routines, what are they? Clipping our nails, brushing our teeth, and eating are things we constantly do, but seldom think about.

Arttu Merimaa discusses the relationship between artistic actions and objects and the artist. In a video essay, which verges on the documentary, Merimaa remakes a clay sculpture that he made as a child but that was later lost. The artist tries to recreate the sculpture, which depicts a cave, to…

‘Ecological fallacy’ is a statistical term that is defined simply as an error in reasoning. Hence the title of the exhibition refers to an error or a mistaken assumption in the interpretation of statistical data. The artworks in this biennial investigate analogous errors and assumptions made by the ruling powers of the world – governments, corporations, banks – while challenging our own fallacies and the forces that violate the ecological balance of the earth.

Objects on Oil brings to the fore the fossil basis of human experience, economic activity, and industrialised societies more widely, and the breaks in our understanding related to this material foundation.

The exhibition Tavoittamattomien hetkien häivähdyksiä ('Glimpses of the Unattainable') is based on materials donated to the Finnish Museum of Photography by an amateur photographer. A joint effort between the curator Mirjami Schuppert and two artists, Hertta Kiiski and Niina Vatanen, the exhibition explores the photographic archive as something that generates multiple meanings and that is a continuous and plentiful source of inspiration.

​Golden Age 6 tells small stories and lets the viewer visit images that mostly speak of something entirely different than what they were intended to record.

The die-cut scraps from our childhood come to life in Karoliina Paappa's exhibition Tyttö ja tiikeri (The Girl and the Tiger).

The photographs of the French artist Smith (born 1985) explore the themes of absence and presence, as they paint a picture of the constant changes a young person undergoes. This major solo exhibition is Smith's debut in the Nordic countries. Still in her late twenties, Paris-based Smith was brought…

In the Beginning There Was Everything is Tuija Lindström's (born 1950) first comprehensive retrospective to be held in Finland. The themes of beauty and death, and life and humanity, are at the heart of the works presented at the exhibition. Lindström is one of Sweden's most well-known…