Press

For more info and access to press photos, please contact:

Lauri Alaviitala, Communications Specialist,
lauri.alaviitala@fmp.fi , +358 50 5268 336

Does it feel familiar? – Photographs of everyday life in Finland

February 7 to May 20, 2018

What does your everyday life feel like: the morning rush-hour or a sleep-in in the morning, lunch at the canteen or a quickly grabbed ready meal from the shop? In 2016, ten photographers documented everyday Finnish life, each from their own personal point of view. The starting point was to comment on the increasing inequality in Finnish society. People may find some of the stories captured in the images easy to relate to, while others may be more remote.

The exhibition provokes thoughts about financial worries, the sufficiency of social services, and the importance of family and friends at difficult times in life. There’s also a lot of hope and happiness in the images. Where does trust in the future come from? If we understood each other better, would it increase our ability to experience empathy and togetherness? Maybe it is the small coincidences that determine how our lives ultimately turn out?

Photographs by Pira Cousin, Aimo Hyvärinen, Susanna Juvakka, Taru Leinonen, Pasi Räsämäki, Arto Timonen, Adolfo Vera, Hannu Väisänen, Mikko Waltari, and Saana Wang.

In addition to images from 2016, photographs from the Finnish Museum of Photography collection, from the 1950s to the 2000s, have been selected for display at the exhibition.

Older photographs by Helvi Ahonen, Caj Bremer, Helge Heinonen, Ismo Hölttö, Per Olov Jansson, Ben Kaila, Raakel Kuukka, Eino Mäkinen, Kalervo Ojutkangas, Mikko Savolainen, Tapio Vanhatalo, and Pekka V. Virtanen.

The exhibition is based on a workshop entitled Arjen kuvat (‘Photographs of Everyday Life’), which was implemented by the Photographic Artists’ Association in 2016 as part of a University of Eastern Finland research project entitled Two Finlands – Is Inequality Increasing? The project combines social science research, journalism, and photographic art to discuss the increasing inequality in Finland in the 2010s. The photography workshop was led by Ida Pimenoff and Liisa Söderlund. The 400 photographs created in the workshop were donated to the collection of the Finnish Museum of Photography.

The Two Finlands project was funded by the Kone Foundation.

The ehxhibition has been supported by Tradeka.

Heidi Piiroinen: The Invisibles – Story of a Beggar Family

February 7 to May 20, 2018

Who are they? Where did they come from? What are they doing here? In 2007, unfamiliar people sat down on the streets in Helsinki and some other Finnish cities. People like these had not been seen in the Nordic periphery before. The newcomes were greeted with bewilderment, pity, questions – and what often comes out of facing the unknown – fear and hatred.

For ten years, photographer Heidi Piiroinen and journalist, author Kimmo Oksanen have been following the life of Romanian Mihaela Stoica and her family and siblings in Finland, Romania, Greece, Estonia and France.

Stoica came to Helsinki as a street beggar in 2007 from the village of Cetatea de Baltă, Romania. On her 17th birthday, in February 2008, she gave birth to her first child in Helsinki. Now she is a mother of three living in Helsinki. Mihaela herself has not been to any schools and cannot read or write. Her firstborn now goes to school in Finland. Is there hope for a better future for him?

Through the personal story of Mihaela, the exhibition deals with larger societal issues, Romania, Europe and the reception of Romanian beggars in Finland. With photographs and texts, Oksanen and Piiroinen dig into the reasons for street begging, the living conditions of families in Transylvania, and the phenomenon of Romanian people leaving their homes and becoming street beggars in Western Europe.

The project will also be published as a book Ohikuljetut – erään kerjäläisperheen tarina (WSOY) in February 2018.

PRESS PHOTOS

Images of the works are available viewing and downloading on a Google Drive folder. Credits (to be included with any published photos) can be found in the filename, and feature the name of the photographer, the name of the series, and its date (not all photographs will have a date associated with them). Download images by pressing the ‘download’ button on the top of the page – it’s possible to download multiple images simultaneously.

For access to press photos, please contact:

Lauri Alaviitala, Communications Specialist,
lauri.alaviitala@fmp.fi , +358 50 5268 336