Johanna Karjalainen

NOTHING BUT DISAPPOINTING discusses the relationship between non-human and human animals. The work questions the colonialist way in which nature and animals have been seen and photographed. “Nothing but disappointing” consists of “wildlife” photographs photographed with a trail camera in Northern Finland as well as archival super 8 film material from family archives. The archival material was filmed during summer holidays in the 80s by the artist’s dad and then recently reorganized by the artist. Thus, the work is also a reflection on the process of our social conditioning when it comes to human and non-human relationships through the example of zoos. 

As John Berger puts it in About Looking:
“The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond. They scan mechanically. They have been immunized to encounter, because nothing can anymore occupy a central place in their attention. Therein lies the ultimate consequence of their marginalization….This historic loss, to which zoos are a monument, is now irredeemable for the culture of capitalism.”

AN IDEA OF NATURE explores the questions of landscape by creating links between painting and photography, abrstraction and naturalism. The idea of nature, the landscape, is preserved on paper by using the photographic printing process of cyanotype. The negative and the positive space of the cyan-blue prints create forms and shapes that merge into a landscape of personal importance. 

Abstract renditions of mountains, sea and sky interpret the northern landscape, the landscape of the artist’s personal importance. Yet, it isn’t a photograph of any particular place, It is composed from forms and shapes that reminded her of nature. 

Johanna Karjalainen (Rovaniemi, Finland, 1987) is a Sociologist and a master’s student in Photography at Aalto University, Helsinki. She experiments with the boundaries of landscape photography by physically intervening within the image and the landscape. She uses different techniques of printmaking to emphasize the materiality of photograph. Her work is often inspired by the process of reduction. “The slow process of silk screen printing is like painting for me. Yet, my works are photographs and they become part of the imagery of landscape photography, which has (especially in the case of Lapland) been overtaken by technically perfect photographs often photographed for the purpose of marketing Lapland tourism”, Karjalainen explains.