No one uses the camera like the photographer Niko Luoma. He is not interested in capturing the world in front of his lens. He uses light to create his own visual spheres. Using up to a thousand multiple exposures he applies individual elements of color and form to the negative, layer by layer. Meticulous calculations and geometrical skills are the necessary foundation for this. The results are abstract photographs of impressive, colorful intensity and luminosity. This book of photos is based on the series Adaptations, which reproduces famous works by other artists. Luoma presents a fascinating visual game in which the independent charisma of the photographs acts in concert with its reverence toward Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Vincent van Gogh, or Pablo Picasso. With tongue in cheek referencing, Luoma thus realizes the avant-garde’s desire to liberate photography from reproducing reality, allowing it to become an art.

Persons Projects is happy to present the new volume of The Helsinki School: The Nature of Being, Vol. 6. The publication has been launched Saturday 7 November during Paris Photo Fair 2019.

It concentrates on bringing together the various approaches used by the School’s representatives to conceptualize nature visibly. The stated goal is not to limit oneself to purely physical depictions of animals, plants, and landscapes. Nature ought to be expressed through a di¤erent type of unit and with a new way of gauging time. Days, months, and seasons become the points of crystallization for time. Thus, the photographs reflect a Nordic sense about feelings of loneliness, jealousy, or desire. The works provide photographic insight into the complex horizon of emotions that characterize our individual views of nature. They do not portray landscape as such, but the world in which we live.
Since the 1990s the name Helsinki School has been used to describe a group of fine art photographers who studied, taught, or graduated from the Aalto University’s School of Art, Design and Architecture. The term unites a consistent conceptual approach.