Jorma Puranen, Imaginary Homecoming
Imaginary Homecoming. 1992
“During a visit to the Finnish Sámi region, Puranen was shown a series of unusually beautiful portrait photographs in monochrome originally used in a book project by Nils-Aslak Valkeapää [known as Áillohaš]. He was informed that they were from a photograph library at the Musée de L’Homme in Paris. Puranen visited the library and found a number of photographs, mainly portrait studies, taken in 1884 during Prince Roland Bonaparte’s expedition to the Sámi regions in the north. The images were taken by a French photographer by the name of G. Roche. Puranen photographed a selection of the portraits and mounted them on acrylic plates. He took them back to the landscape in which they were originally taken and arranged them as installations he photographed. The installations may be perceived as an attempt to relocate cultural elements from the past back to the present, and a transgression of time and space. The project was also presented in book form.” (Perspektivet Museum, Tromsø)
The book project shown to Puranen by Áillohaš was his seminal work Beaivi, Áhčážan (The Sun, My Father) (1988), a vast collection of his poems accompanied by images, photographs and illustrations as well as a recorded reading of the work in Sámi accompanied by joiks, music and nature sounds. The work established Áillohaš as one of the top Sámi artists of modern times and is regarded as being at the forefront of reviving mainstream interest in Sámi culture and music. Beaivi, Áhčážan won the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize in 1991. The multidisciplinary epic is a wholesome journey of sight and sound in which the artist takes on an almost shamanistic role of storyteller. However, only the original Sámi version of the book includes these images and illustrations, with the English and Finnish translations bearing only plain text. Áillohaš himself was deliberate in this paring down of the translated versions, knowing many nuances of language and history would be lost on those not proficient in the Sámi language or tradition: “The poet has himself repressed this complexity in the translations, which do not include the photographic images and are not accompanied by the literal soundtrack. According to the poet, the photographs are intended exclusively for the Sámi — for the exclusive use of the Sámi family (Hirvonen, "Aurinko", 38)” [Dana, p.21]. Indeed, he did not approve of the original use of the Bonaparte expedition’s photographs, or the artefacts the Prince collected to take back to France, including a govadas drum. This resentment can be seen in the final pages of Beaivi, Áhčážan: “Image 564 of a Sámi skeleton in a coffin from the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Oslo, the blurred and darkened sieidi in Image 568, and the curious petroglyphs of humans in Image 571, their arms upraised in surrender or despair or jubilation, emphasize the invasive nature of the Prince's collecting journey to Sápmi in the late 19th century and the ambivalent situation of Sámi culture at the end of the twentieth. “ [ibid. p.30]
Revisiting the photographs by Puranen, which I first encountered in 2011 and enjoyed very much, in the context of this information is an evocative realignment of my own feelings about this work. I find it odd that Puranen, who is not Sámi, still used the ethnographic portraits for his own artistic project, despite the Sámi artist who was kind enough to show them to him (from his own finished artwork) explicitly stating that the reclamation and use of these images should be the right and property of the oppressed Sámi minority alone. Puranen then wanted to reproduce these images as well for his own use. His work Imaginary Homecoming, though no doubt coming from a place of good intentions, echoes of a certain kind of arctic exoticism, or a harkening to a seemingly distant past with some ancient tribe. But is this ‘homecoming’ really his story to tell? The Sámi people are still very much a living culture and nation, with artists, musicians and activists already producing work heavily featuring their historical plight and oppression by Western forces, as well as simply celebrating, preserving and improving their current state through visual and musical mediums.
The summaries and exhibition catalogue entries accompanying Puranen’s shows mostly seem to make it out as though he ‘happened’ to find the old photographs, such as in this entry from the Espoo Museum of Modern Art’s catalogue during his retrospective (which I saw in 2011): “Imaginary Homecoming is a project spanning several years and the result of many twists of fate and work phases. The series’ theme comprises Lapp portraits [Lapp is considered a dated term, which the Museum should know] photographed on glass negatives which Puranen came across in the archives of the Musée de l ‘Homme in Paris.”
However this could be blamed on the museum’s own editing, as Puranen’s own artist statement for the work does not hide the origins of the photographs: “ In the spring of 1988, I visited the Sámi poet Nils-Aslak Valkeapää in Pättikä, near Enontekiö, in Finnish Lapland. He showed me a series of black-and-white photographs, portraits of Sámi people, which he used in his book Beaivi Áhcázan (The Sun My Father). It was obvious to me that these exceptionally beautiful pictures were taken by a skilled portraitist, and I learned that Valkeapää had discovered them in the Musée de L'Homme, Paris. When I happened to be in Paris myself, to satisfy my curiosity, I visited the picture archive at the museum.”
Puranen had been working in Lapland for several decades, and found he recognised some of the names in the glass plates with people he had met in Lapland. I wish he had collaborated with these people during the project, or if he did, that their roles in bringing the project to life would be more highlighted. Puranen does admit that his work is not outwith the discourse of colonialism and power, explaining thus:
“Landscape is always a screen on to which we project different fantasies and perspectives, including historical speculation. Thus landscape can also be likened to a theatre, or a stage. In one sense at least, photography and theatre are similar: both divide people into viewers and actors, reminding us of the divided nature of the world. Just as the curtain divides the audience from the actors, so the camera divides the photographer from the model, and the viewer from the person who is viewed.
This instrumentally created distinction between inside and outside lies at the heart of many of the problems of cultural studies, (documentary) photography and power, problems from which my work is by no means exempt.
[..]Taking a picture is like a ceremony or a ritual where the photographer struggles to reach beyond the landscape as it appears in its everyday guise. However, although Imaginary Homecoming excavates vanished cultural states, it also seeks to suggest a sort of historical 'counter-memory.' Indeed, this is the aim of Imaginary Homecoming:to offer an alternative way of looking at a landscape and the concomitant facts, which we may know already. In pondering the relation between past and present, instead of merely offering a new explanation for what we may have lost, the black-and-white photographs that make up Imaginary Homecoming try to suggest what we might, perhaps, still find.”
I find Puranen’s work very aesthetically appealing, and went to see his exhibition at EMMA twice, spending ages gazing up at a wall comprising of icy landscapes and arctic expedition scenes in Where Compasses All Go Mad.
I was instantly drawn to this frozen world of tundra and snow, a mysterious part of my country that I have only briefly glimpsed as a tourist, a part of the heritage of where I am from but by no means MY personal heritage. I am a lover of adventure and thrills, of the unknown and unexplored, and a sucker for the romantic. This same longing is echoed in Puranen’s work, especially in the above, where the photographs work together to create a scene of northern voyage that is mainly visual and emotional, but devoid of straight historical fact. Victorian expeditions to the far corners of the world were seen as exotic and wonderful forays into places and times untouched by the sweat and fog of modern industrialism. The same view was not shared by the cultures and nations ‘explored’ by these Princes and Lords (who were often given credit for ‘discovering’ the North Pole, or the Americas - impossible feats without local unnamed guides). The portraits collected by Prince Bonaparte’s expedition were a mark of their time, no doubt valuable to anthropologic study but still reflective of an oppressive and voyeuristic practice.
Nils-Aslak Valkeapää was an artist who was successful in reclaiming these images to create a highly evocative multidisciplinary work not only about his Sámi people, but specifically, FOR Sámi people. This kind of exclusion of Western mainstream audiences creates a juicy tension between the concealment and celebration of his work and culture. The Bonaparte portraits held very deep, and quite painful meaning to Valkeapää and his people. To Puranen, they were “obvious[ly]... exceptionally beautiful pictures”. Áillohaš saw a chance to retrieve what had once been taken, and place it back into the private consumption of his living, breathing people. Puranen, like the museum visitors and collectors in Paris, saw pretty and fascinating photos of a perceived distant culture, which could once more be used in a mainstream context for the enjoyment of Western gallery goers.
Photography, particularly documentary photography, is one of the most fascinating, rewarding and volatile realms of artistic practice. It can cause immense harm as well as immeasurably great visibility and awareness. Documentary photographers and artists from dominant cultures should be aware of how far their invitation to explore and interact with other people and cultures extend. They should strive to collaborate or step down to give the stage to the actual ‘subjects’ of their work whenever possible. They should not use material which has been expressedly claimed (or reclaimed) by the people it once used to hurt. The vast majority of work created about non-mainstream cultures remains wholly outside the realms of their own possible consumption of said work.
Puranen created beautiful pictures.
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