Past exhibitions

"I was sitting on a train on my way home, and listening to music. The words of a child sitting behind me penetrated through the music. She was saying how, nowadays, it is nice to go home from the children's home for the weekend, since mummy no longer throws her against the wall."

The exhibition at the Finnish Museum of Photography offers the first extensive overview of the Harvesters'photographs, which were created in the face of the intense headwind blowing from the left-wing artworld. The Harvesters group's photographs also allow us to view writing about the history of Finnish photography in a new light.

Between 2006 and 2009, Ann Pelanne made several visits to quiet little village, and to the premises of what used to be Kellokoski Ironworks, to take photographs. These trips were made in different years and different seasons. The result was Mariefors Blues, the artist's interpretation of the…

"There is almost no summer night in the north; only a lingering evening, darkening slightly as it lingers, but even this darkening has its ineffable clarity." Thus begins F.E. Sillanpää's novel Ihmiset suviyössä (1934, quotation from People in the Summer Night, transl. by Alan Blair, 1966). The…

Mindscapes 1960 - 2010 is a retrospective view of the 50-year oeuvre of photographic artist Professor Antero Takala (b.1939). The hundred-plus photographs now being shown together for the first time form a black-and-white landscape study; a paean to Finnish nature, to northern light, to lake landscapes, and to Lapland. The exhibition also includes a series of portrait studies of Finnish stage actors from the 1960s.

The show includes Majuri's earlier photographs along with totally new works made for the exhibition: Kultakolikot / Treasure (2009), Lumikettu / Arctic Fox (2009) and Vesiputous / Waterfall (2009). "My new pictures give me a childish euphoria: I'm writing in a language that I can't even read yet!" Majuri says.

Art-photography students from the Aalto University School of Art and Design collected Finnish people's memories of Paris. With these memories as their research material, they used their cameras to record their own interpretations. The result is a pictorial travelogue from various corners of this…

The Take a Peep exhibition focuses on children as camera users, who have a right to their own ways of expressing themselves and of making pictures. In the workshops the children have taken a peep through the camera's viewfinder - at themselves, at each other and at their surroundings - and taken…

The Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg houses an untold number of artworks, which are guarded by a large band of museum attendants. Russian/Dutch photographer Lucia Ganieva's (b.1968) exhibition Ermitazhniki - Museum Attendants is a tribute to these quiet workers of the Hermitage, and to their knowledge of art.

Atelieri O. Haapala's photography exhibition revives portrait traditions that are over a hundred years old. The show offers nostalgia and extravagant costumes, the charm of the bourgeoisie, but also opium-fumed, decadent vices. The touring photographic studio has immortalized its clients in 19th-century spirit. The result is a fine collection of modern cabinet portraits.

The exhibition From Misty Morning to Composition presents an unparalleled overview of Finnish post-war art photography, mainly from the 1950s. Most of the artworks are from the collections of the Finnish Museum of Photography. Lost key pieces have been recovered, and some of the destroyed works have been re-proofed. The overview is based on the research by Leena Saraste, the curator of this exhibition, and architect Kirsti Kasnio’s visual design.