“In Icy Prospects I have expressly reflected on the nature of the painterly, the sublime, and the mysterious.” Jorma Puranen

“The north, this highly elusive dimension, is perhaps more than just a spiritual home. It made me what I am.” Jorma Puranen

Jorma Puranen (*1951) is one of Finland’s most well-known photographers. His work is conceptual. In his last series, he used archival visual material on Nordic themes as his point of departure, creating alternatives to the objectification and coding it contained in his own photographs.

His latest series, Icy Prospects, was inspired by the ways the great explorers as well as today’s tourists to the North Pole are fascinated by the arctic landscape. Puranen painted a board with black, high-gloss acrylic and then took long exposures of the icy landscapes mirrored in this wooden surface. The results are extremely painterly, highly aesthetic, fragmented impressions of nature in which the ground, the brushstroke, and the reflection are inseparably superimposed. In this way, the photographer creates a relationship between the philosophical concept of the “sublime terror” of the forces of nature and his own experience of life in these regions, typifying the north as a projection surface for fantasies and the imagination.