Photo North – Northern Photographic Centre’s summer exhibition Anticipation brings together poetic and documentary photography from several decades. The exhibition explores nostalgia, memories, inevitable fates and unfulfilled expectations. The artists of the exhibition are Anni Leppälä, Jorma Mylly, Ananya Tanttu and Aino Väänänen, and the exhibition is curated by Henna Harri, director of the Finnish Association of Photographic Artists, together with Photo North director Darja Zaitsev.
A photograph freezes the moment, yet never fully captures it. It is both a trace and a promise, an image of the past and a window to the future. The exhibition invites viewers to consider the artists’ works not only as visual representations, but also as temporal experiences and manifestations of anticipation. We often wait for something that is important to us: the course of things, events, the passage of time, the season. We create expectations for ourselves, but expectations are also created by social situations and the society around us. The stories of our families and the ways of being and living that are passed down from generation to generation are also full of expectations.
The exhibition opens with documentary filmmaker Jorma Mylly‘s images of holiday resorts and the partying youth of recent decades. For the artist, photography is all about play; in his own words, “seriousness kills creativity”. Summer sandy beaches and travel destinations are seen as havens of tranquillity, where the busy workers of the winter months slip away to relax on their long-awaited holidays. Mylly’s surprising shots of Midsummer Eve revelers in Kalajoki at the turn of the millennium are a succinct testimony to how a newspaper photographer can at best approach his work like an actor and live it with all his soul. The characters in the photographer’s works are thrown into an unpredictable flow of events, perhaps against all expectations.
From Mylly’s celebratory crowds the viewer moves on to examine the expectations and the stories of the most vulnerable. The photos from documentary photographer Aino Väänänen‘s series Dandelions (2018–) capture the lives of people struggling with opioid addiction and living with HIV in a large Romanian city in an empathetic yet honest way. Väänänen’s documentary style reflects the intensity and multi-dimensionality of the world of her subjects. The artist has witnessed the harsh reality of the Romanian urban landscape, marked by chaos and survival, but also by love.
In a room in the middle of the exhibition space, a body of work by the photographic and video artist Ananya Tanttu explores the concepts of the sacred and the sublime. An installation entitled Altar reflects the expectations of ritual and religion, but also the everyday search for the sacred in photography – in its subjects, its reproductions and perhaps its aura. Despite the secularisation of our times, private shrines and our own altars still play an important role. They are collections of amulets and treasures found, acquired and received, representing the good and the reassuring, giving visual expression to our most intimate beliefs and expectations. In addition to Altar, the space will feature Tanttu’sbook A Book of the Sublime (A Dream Within a Dream) (2020–), which uses photo-collage to explore the relationship between the human subconscious and the environment as it is perceived.
Finally, the viewer enters the already lost atmosphere of photographer Anni Leppälä’s family home, its light, colours and materials. The house has become a metaphor for a home that she has been able to say goodbye to, to preserve and to return to. The house perpetuates childhood experiences of family separation, silence and loneliness. The works ask what kind of history families live through and what kind of future they create. The house has become a space of expectation and transformation, a condensation of all possible images and memories, waiting as a reflective surface, as a window, as light and dust, ready to receive some essential experience of recognition.
Anticipation reflects on the importance of memories and expectations of the past, and what kind of melancholy takes over the mind when summer slowly turns to autumn and anticipation turns into days already lived. The final work in the exhibition is a farewell to the viewer, with the sun’s rays filtering through Leppälä’s window.
for my father and mother
I yearn so deeply
a pheasant’s cry.
– Bashō 1687 (translated by David Landis Barnhill)
Anticipation
Anni Leppälä, Jorma Mylly, Ananya Tanttu & Aino Väänänen
7.6.–31.8.2025 (gallery is closed due Valve’s summer break 30.6.-27.7.)
Photo North – Northern Photographic Centre’s gallery
Curators: Henna Harri & Darja Zaitsev
Articles headpicture: 23:30 of the series Juhannus by Jorma Mylly
