Pentti Sammallahti, a Photographer at Peace with the World — Blind Journal

On a rocky island, at some point, Pentti Sammallahti lived by a photographic epiphany. “Finding myself on a rocky island, it suddenly dawned on me that the earth was not round, and I decided not to move,” this light grasp of restraint would later recall. “I suddenly grasped what the stone beside me, the boat on the shore, the cloud sailing across the sky, and the dotted trail of migrating birds were telling me… I then understood that photographs are not taken; they are received.”

The panoramic format asserted itself early on. From Helsinki, he set off to roam Europe and the Soviet Union seeking these suspended moments. Writer Gérard Macé, whose preface accompanies the paperback reissue of his work by Actes Sud, sees in it “a universe of fables.” Not that the scenes he captures illustrate these of Aesop or La Fontaine, however anybody who has learn these animal tales will discover an echo of them in these photographs. A canine enthroned on a snowmobile takes on the air of a sovereign savoring a newfound energy. Bird portraits, for his or her half, pay tribute above all to the intelligence of corvids.

What strikes one, although, Macé writes, is “their mystery and their dignity, their life and their personality in full,” freed from any ethical. Every animal right here leads “a life like our own, and yet parallel.” A griffon vulture of princely bearing walks alone by an Alpine panorama. The similar presence inhabits a Nepalese monkey, caught in profile beneath a sheltering tree, in a posture someplace between scribe and sphinx. It brings the essayist again to a line of La Fontaine which may have been written for it: “So a creature may think, and yet not know itself.” A quiet humor isn’t far-off, within the fabulist as within the photographer.

This attentiveness to the thriller of life runs all the best way into the photographer’s method. His photographs breathe endurance, unhurried time, and a deep complicity with nature. The very paper of the prints, the essayist notes, echoes the shades of snow, “melting and crystalline, warm and cold at once.” The Finnish winter stamps darkish silhouettes onto the stainless panorama with a sharpness recalling the work of Bruegel, besides that the solitude, in Sammallahti’s work, feels larger nonetheless. Summer reverses the character of those contrasts: two white horses seem on the black sand of the Outer Hebrides, beneath an outsized cloud.

This similar reversal governs the picture gracing the duvet of the brand new version of the ebook dedicated to him: pink flamingos, captured in Namibia, reveal their sensible pallor above darkish water and reeds which are virtually black. In Seoul, a chook crosses a milky sky the place a veiled moon hangs amongst pine branches. Beneath a solar that’s, as soon as once more, veiled, a toad meets the photographer’s lens. Gérard Macé imagines that it’s the exact same frog whose leap the Japanese poet Bashō immortalized centuries earlier, in his most celebrated haiku, returned immediately to satisfy the gaze of “a poet turned photographer.”

The parallel feels all of the extra becoming given how readily his eye evokes a Japanese aesthetic: in its quietness, actually, in its magnificence, but additionally within the profound non secular dimension one senses beneath his photographs. A scrumptious suspension of time, to be savored like a restorative pause on the very coronary heart of Arles, earlier than returning dwelling to lose oneself as soon as extra in his full physique of labor.

Exhibition: “Pentti Sammallahti”, at Les Rencontres d’Arles, Espace Croisière (Association du Méjan). Curated by Pentti Sammallahti and Géraldine Lay.

Book: Pentti Sammallahti, preface by Gérard Macé, reissued within the Photo Poche assortment by Actes Sud. 144 pages. €14.50.