Exhibition Celebrates Pioneering Finnish Photographer Claire Aho

A brand new exhibition celebrates the work of the pioneering Finnish photographer Claire Aho, who reworked postwar pictures together with her daring use of colour and trendy model.

Hundred Heroines is presenting Colour Me Modern: Claire Aho and the New Woman, a free exhibition on view till May 31. Hundred Heroines is the one U.Ok.-based charity targeted on girls in pictures, celebrating previous, current, and future photographers.

Aho (1925–2015), referred to as the “Grand Old Lady of Finnish Photography,” introduced wit, colour, and cinematic aptitude to postwar image-making. Working throughout trend, promoting, and editorial pictures, she embraced daring palettes and trendy design at a time when a lot pictures remained monochrome. The exhibition highlights how she helped form a brand new visible language for Finland, presenting assured, modern girls and reworking on a regular basis scenes into rigorously staged moments of favor.

“There is so much bad news around at the moment, we wanted to show something cheerful,” Del Barrett, curator and founding father of Hundred Heroines, says of the exhibition. “In the same way that Claire used color and a modern style to project confidence and optimism about the future, we hope this exhibition leaves visitors feeling uplifted, energised, and more hopeful about what lies ahead.”

Colour Me Modern situates Aho inside a broader story of ladies photographers who formed visible tradition however have been usually ignored. Her pictures seize a society in transition, reflecting each the business world and the on a regular basis realities of ladies’s lives within the Fifties and 60s, demonstrating her lasting affect on pictures in Finland and past.

Aho discovered her craft from her father, Heikki Aho, a photographer and filmmaker. She started her profession as a documentary filmmaker earlier than opening her personal studio within the Fifties, a formative interval in Finnish design. Inspired by her father’s critique of poor-quality colour pictures in Finland, she developed strategies that produced vibrant, rigorously composed photos. Her work captured the liveliness of Helsinki’s cultural scene and shortly gained consideration from business publications and types. In 1957, she produced Helsinki, Itämeren tytär (Daughter of the Baltic Sea), the primary colour photobook in postwar Finland documenting metropolis life. These photos have been later proven internationally, together with in New York, Geneva, Nairobi, and Helsinki, in an exhibition organized by the United Nations to mark the centenary of Finnish independence in 2017.

Aho was the one lady to movie the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. As wartime restrictions eased, she was capable of work with colour pictures, capturing the occasion’s flags and celebrations, together with Finland’s official blue-and-white cross. Her work there led to her being employed by Pathé News in New York as the one lady amongst 400 male reporters masking Finland.

Her business work mirrored the optimism of postwar Finland. In adverts for manufacturers corresponding to Fazer, Jaffa, and Paulig, she included playful and creative staging, together with levitating confectionery with invisible thread and decorative penguins amongst ice cream shows.

More details about Colour Me Modern: Claire Aho and the New Woman will be discovered here.

Image credit: All images courtesy of Hundred Heroines.