Tuula Närhinen

Animalcams

What does a ladybird see? What kind of photographs would a mole take? How would you like to see the world through an elk's eyes?

Tuula Närhinen (b. 1967) built pinhole cameras with mechanisms that resemble the construction and function of various animals' eyes. She then set up the cameras in places where an animal might have moved. The exhibition includes both the animalcams and pictures taken with them.

"Taking pictures with the animalcams has been a kind of voyage of discovery for me - a way of taking the ‘eye in the hand' that I have built and putting it in places to which people do not usually have access. The animalcams remind us of the limitations of people's perceptual world. An enormous amount of reality is left out, reality that we cannot access without special technical equipment, for example, a photograph, or even with the aid of animals' acute sense of smell", Tuula Närhinen says.

The cameras used nowadays came out of a need to construct a mechanical human eye, which would copy the view in front of it from a single, static point. Närhinen's animalcams show that photographs and cameras can be quite different from the way they are now.

The Animalcams belong to the collections of Helsinki Art Museum.