FLASHBACKS
Saara Kumpulainen
Gallery Ronga, Tampere
30.9-19.10.2023
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A camera can capture the world in photographic detail, but photographs seldom confine themselves to reality's boundaries. For instance, when you expose two images onto the same film frame, something new is born. Double exposure can combine two landscapes into one image and create a place that does not exist. In overlapping images, people, surroundings, lights, and shadows blend into a kind of mental landscape or visual manifestations of memories.
The photographs in the exhibition are memories from my own travels. They are double-exposed and also under- and over-exposed moods from meaningful and meaningless places and situations. The photos were taken between 2017 and 2023, and there are thousands of kilometers between the shooting locations. I have assembled them into a series for this exhibition. I am fascinated by analog image formation. Objects photographed twice on film merge into one image, and their layers cannot be distinguished from each other. The exhibition photos were taken with a Lomo Instant camera on Fujifilm Instax Mini instant film. For large format print, I have scanned the original Fuji Instax photos but edited them digitally as little as possible. They are allowed to be as they are; blurry, confused, overexposed, underexposed, and double-exposed, just like memories.
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Thank you: Eeva Saaros, Valokuvakeskus Peri, Kuva-Paijula, family, and those who were with me on my travels.