The photographic artist Sami Parkkinen’s (b. 1974) Paradise photograph series records his life in pictures over a period of a year. The series is about depression and recovery from it.
In 2008, Sami Parkkinen (b. 1974) became ill with severe depression. The depressed person loses the desire to do things, nothing seems to have any meaning. Even though taking pictures was a great effort, for the next year, Parkkinen documented his life in diary-like photographs.
He thought about what makes us unhappy and what constitutes a good life. Parkkinen thinks we live in a hurried world with too many possibilities, with happiness and this hurried world existing in mutual conflict. We lose our sense of community and forget those close to us, becoming stressed animals pacing back and forth in a cage. “In many ways, we have become greedy and selfish. Do we want more from life than it can give us? We actually have nothing except this moment, and our own presence,” Parkkinen says.
These pictures had their beginnings in a serious subject, but they also contain colour and black humour. The exhibition speaks about the healing power of photography. For Parkkinen, taking the pictures in the Paradise series was a way of coping. He hopes these photographs will inspire other people to make their own pictorial diaries, and reduce the barriers to talking about depression.
The Finnish Museum of Photography
Project Space
The Cable Factory, The Cable Factory, Tallberginkatu 1 G, 00180 Helsinki
