My most recent series of works, The New Landscapes, are urban landscapes or (city) scapes, photographed in Finland (Jyväskylä, Kuopio and Helsinki), in the USA (Brooklyn - New York), in Switzerland (Zürich and Basel), Germany (Düsseldorf and various places), and Portugal (Azores), between years 2004-2006. The photographs from The New Landscapes are taken from famous metropolises or buildings, factories, cemeteries, airports, towers - mostly strategical important places. They involve a mixture of lights in the scenery and a long exposure so that they almost become short movies. These special urban landscapes are basically drawings of my body movements reproduced on the photographic material, as rhythmical light lines where the subject and the scenery melt into a single image. Pictorial motifs are divided into different surfaces: the abstract and pictorial surface refers to the human presence (breathing, heartbeat, laughter, talking, walking during the exposure time) and to the photography as a medium that, in my work, is moving closer to the painting. The subject is still strongly present, whereas the object - the scenery - is estranged and thus becomes easier to deal with, and safer than the actual place. The serie The New Landscapes follows my sociological interest towards the individual who is sensing, understanding and placing himself in the outside world. There are conceptual similarities with my previous works about control and the fear of losing control. The New Landscapes can also be seen as an attempt to capture and control a possibly dangerous city at night from a distance. The alienation of the object and the aesthetic of emptiness are still present in my new images and the scale is often obscure. The presence of individuals and their achievements can appear in my work, even if they are not exactly shown. The images have been reworked by computer. My figurative language – minimalism or reduction of an information – is more a visual method, which have references to symbolic or linguistic meanings (emptiness, infinity) but also it can be seen as an historical art reference to modernist painting. As a result of all these pictures become concentrated narrations of recognition and moment as well as large colour abstractions that have profound significance of the surrounding reality.
Nanna Hänninen