Tonight I want everything to be perfect. I am quite sure tonight is the night. No new events have occurred for couple of days so tonight must be the night.

                   I come home from work. Everything is just the way I left it. Why wouldn’t it be? If something had moved I would have definitely noticed that. I remember the certain positions of every item I have. It’s the only way to know if someone has been in my apartment. That doesn’t mean I’m a crazy person I just clean a lot.

                   Though I feel festive tonight, I haven’t prepared any luxurious food for me for this night: canned tomato soup in the cupboard and some beer in the fridge. I open one beer and sit down to my sofa and sigh. It’s been like this for a while. Just me in my apartment sitting on my sofa. There has been no one special in my life for a while. Yes there are kind of friends you occasionally have a pint or two with in a pub around the corner but probably better if there is no one special around, my kind of orderliness is not for everyone and everyone is not for the my kind of orderliness. To be honest I don’t know what my life could possibly offer to someone or possibly to a lady friend. In its all simplicity the modest and unpretentious life what I have is pretty much what I need. In the end I am quite content to my life as the way it is, just me and my life and my apartment. A human’s (in this case my) basic necessities are fulfilled.

                   Tonight I want to look better than usual. After a long and thorough shower I choose to wear the shirt I bought two months ago for a special occasion that I have never worn yet before but tonight I will. I walk across my apartment feeling fine and dandy, like a king in my kingdom. Now when I think about it I can’t remember the last time I had a visitor in my apartment, must be years ago then. It’s not because me being unsocial: I just love a good chat with a stranger or with anyone but my apartment is only for myself. That is the way it shall be at least for now.

                   I watch the sun set and disappear behind the houses painting the sky with orange and gold. When the darkness of the night reaches the city and the lights in the streets turn on I feel myself getting more anxious because of what is hopefully going to happen tonight. In the apartment next to hers I see the old lady watching TV and knitting like most of the time at this time of the day. I have noticed routine in her days of retirement but they still seem even more boring than mine are, I wonder if she has anyone of her family or friends alive. More than once have I thought about inviting her to come over for a coffee: not because I want to have coffee particularly with her but because it would be the right thing to do for someone like her.

                   After checking myself from the mirror the last time and noticing everything looks good enough, quite nice actually, I take one of the chairs in the kitchen and place it next to the window. I turn off the lights, close my pale white curtains to the half way, sit on the chair and light a cigarette.

                   The waiting part is long and backbreaking. Sometimes it feels like insanity is creeping in to you in every possible way mentally and psychically because you sit in one place for hours and hours. I occasionally move around a bit and have a walk in my apartment but I always have that heart tearing fear that I will miss the whole beginning of the show if I put my muscles before the beginning of the show, which is quite rude anyway. They don’t let people in to a theatre or to a cinema as well after the show begins.

                   Suddenly the light gets turned on in her apartment and I gasp air and the cigarette falls off from my hand. The sudden burst of adrenaline makes my hands slightly shake and the excitement feels simply too much to handle at one time. I can see her figure now as she elegantly takes her jacket off and walks across her apartment, in her kingdom as the queen. The show is on.

After I researched voyeurism for the voyeuristic short story we are supposed to write, I think the absolute kings of voyeuristic photography are Weegee and Kohei Yoshiyuki because their use of infrared flash.

            Basically the infrared flash enables you to shoot in complete darkness without drawing attention to yourself due to infrared being that sort of light that the eyes of a human can’t see. This photo taken by Weegee is one of the photos he took secretly in movie theatres in the 1940’s using the infrared flash with his camera. The subjects aren’t aware that they are being models to a photo, which enables very authentic and not at all staged photo and that is exactly what a voyeur (the viewer) wants.

            Kohei Yoshiyuki did a series in two parks in Tokyo with the help of the infrared flash in the 1970’s. People had sexual activities in those parks with unknown spectators being present. Again the subjects aren’t bothered about the photographer because they are unaware of the camera and the flash.

            When I first heard about the task to write a voyeuristic short story I thought about having it happen in an urban environment and in apartment houses because that is where I think the voyeurism happens a lot these days. I love how Yasmine Chatila has taken photos of this kind of voyeurism. To take so many photos secretly requires good observation skills and I think you need to enjoy it a bit as well. The non-sexual voyeuristic photos I’d just say is pure curiosity.

http://www.yasminechatila.com/

We were asked to share our favorite short story, poem or a section of a larger story with the rest of the students in our class and I’ve decided to go with Nick Hornby who is one of my favorite authors. My ultimate favorite is “High Fidelity” but right now I’m reading again “How to Be Good” by Hornby. The book is about Katie Carr, a doctor who just had an affair and is trying to decide whether to try to save her marriage or not. Then there is her angry, cynical and negative husband David and then there is DJ GoodNews who is a faith healer and moves to their house. How Hornby writes is brilliant, I think. Sometimes he is saying a lot of things and on the other hand he doesn’t say much at all. Usually that would annoy me a lot but not in this case which is quite weird to be honest. This has nothing to do with voyeurism (I don’t know does it have to?) but I think it’s brilliant.

In this part of the book Katie is giving her daughter Molly a bath and talking with her why she was sad before going to get healed by GoodNews: her grandmother died, she found her dead cat all over the road, her mum (Katie) had an miscarriage, her parents might get divorced and they will definitely die. In this section Hornby gots it so right that it’s at the same time very frightening and comforting.

“ What has happened to Molly in her first eight years? More or less nothing. We have protected her from the world as best we can. She has been brought up in a loving home, she has two parents, she has never been hungry, and she receives an education that will prepare her for the rest of her life; and yet she is sad, and that sadness is not, when you think about it, inappropriate. The state of the relationship between her parents makes her anxious; she has lost a loved one (and a cat); and she has realized that such losses are going to be an unavoidable part of her life in the future. It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don’t need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.”

“How to Be Good” by Nick Hornby, 2001 Penguin Books, pages 110-111

The exhibition I was very much looking forward to was an exhibition by Diane Arbus in Tate Modern in London and it didn’t disappoint me (the opposite). The photos of Arbus are remarkable documentary photos in their own way and I can’t help but love the stereotypies of the people in the photos. I love how her black and white photos are photographed just the way the subjects are without making a statement and letting the photos speak for themselves. The situations in the photos are very surreal and unique with the deviant people she photographed. If I have to mock something I’ll mock that the photos were quite small and there could’ve been more of them. “Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park in N.Y.C. 1962” is my favorite because of the black humor in the photo.

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/dianearbus/default.shtm

Back in England! Yesterday I went to see Thomas Struth’s exhibition in the Whitechapel gallery in London and it was quite impressive. First of all the photos were MASSIVE which is just a good thing for his very detailed photos. I didn’t know much about Struth’s work before visiting the exhibition so I was quite surprised how versatile his work is. The photos were more of documentary photos speaking for themselves than just plain art, which I usually think is fine but at this time more explanation would have made the photos more interesting. This photo in Las Vegas, Nevada was my favorite because it’s so absurd and funny in its own way, the way that the modern and opposite of modern is combined in real life.

I watched for a short moment for the documentary film rolling on in the gallery and got a bit amused that he faked one of his tourist photos. The point in the photos was to document tourist behavior and then he hires 150 assistants to document tourist behavior. Okay, that’s one way to get exactly what you want but fake is fake. But on the other hand that fake is based on truth and you couldn’t have known that the situation was not real without someone telling it to you so…  A way to get what you want.

http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/thomas-struth-photographs-1978-2010

Before I left Helsinki I visited “Out of Fashion” exhibition opening in Myymälä2. The exhibition exists as a unique photography magazine as well and is made by Eeva Rinne, Siru Kivistö and Ida Taavitsainen who graduated from UCA Rochester this year. Out of Fashion is investigating fashion as something more than just as act of consuming and every one of the photographers had a different point of view. The photos were very interesting and fresh and were about the issue of current interest. The venue was good for the exhibition with the white spacious walls and having a DJ (DJ Inkerin Prinssi) made the whole opening thing even more pleasant. The opening was at the same time kind of reunion of all the Finnish students in UCA Rochester and made the evening even more special.

http://out-of-fashion.tumblr.com/

In Helsinki I went to Ulla Jokisalo’s exhibition opening (Intentions – Under the guise of play) in the Finnish museum of photography. Naturally if you go to the photography museum you expect to see photography so Jokisalo’s work surprised me because I’m not sure can you call her art photography. Not only did she use photos in her works, but also paper cut outs, loads of needles, thread and embroidery. Some of the works also had wood, fabric and other materials in them. With all these elements Jokisalo wants to show that with imagination of play you can combine the real and the imaginary.

The photos were well presented (as always in that museum) in the white walls having enough space around them so it was quite easy to concentrate to the main thing. Sometimes in exhibition openings you watch the photos for a bit and then socialize most of the time but I just couldn’t get my eyes of the photos because I was so surprised by the alluring use of needles and thread. I think that the works including a photograph worked the best because I felt the ones including only cut out images weren’t so personal and unique as the ones including a photograph photographed by the artist herself. In the end, someone else makes the cut out pictures. I think the exhibition was a very fresh point of view, interesting and very enjoyable.

http://www.valokuvataiteenmuseo.fi/en/nayttelyt/nyt/event/63/165—-ulla-jokisalo-aikomuksia-leikin-varjolla

There was also another exhibition going on in one room: Kristiina Männikkö’s The Gaze. The Gaze was about the artist wanting to get a better understanding of her mother and through that of her own identity. The photos were simple portraits of her and her mother with a deep intense gaze straight to the camera. I like the simplicity of the idea and of the photos, and it was quite refreshing to see plain photos after the very detailed and needle full exhibition of Jokisalo. The photos would’ve been totally different if the person had not been looking straight to the camera and that’s why the fact behind the photos makes them special portraits. With all the calm colours it was good that the photos were fair sized. Männikkö says that their relationship became better during the project and happy endings are always a good thing.

http://www.valokuvataiteenmuseo.fi/en/nayttelyt/nyt/event/57/163—-kristiina-maennikkoe-katse

I spent about one week in Helsinki this month and visited ia my friend’s Pipa Nikula’s Indian themed exhibition. I was looking forward to visiting her exhibition because I adore her photos so much. I love that she does everything in film (I don’t think she even owns a digital camera) and does every photo in the darkroom by herself.

The exhibition was in restaurant Maharaja that is an Indian restaurant in Helsinki. The photos were mostly black and white portraits of her travels in India and presented kind of among with the other art that was already in the restaurant. Because of that, you had to search for the photos a bit but at the same time I think that the Indian restaurant was the perfect place for her photos. I love how she doesn’t show the Indian life familiar from the news with all the poverty and modest conditions to live in but the everyday life and the content happy people. Another good thing is that she hasn’t taken the photos being careful that the people won’t notice her but she has actually faced the people and got pretty close-up photos. Another reason why I got so excited about her photos was that what she does is exactly what I want to do: just travel about and take amazing photos.

Since we 2^nd year photography students have an exhibition coming this fall we were advised to visit as many exhibitions as we can this summer. I started my exhibition marathon in Teuva (a very tiny town next to my tiny hometown in the western Finland) where was held a photography exhibition by Heikki Mahlamäki in private premises for one week. The photos were a celebration of the Finnish nature and animals, and the photos were presented in a barn next to the artist’s house, which was an interesting and different place to have an exhibition. After seeing the exhibition the barn seemed very natural place to have the exhibition for photos of the countryside and nature. Some of the photos were quite impressive and one could see a lot of effort and time is behind the photos since Mahlamäki is not a professional photographer. However, I feel that some of the photos were left to the shadow by the breath taking photos, which could’ve been prevented with more careful editing. In the end I’m very much in support of this exhibition because I enjoy nature photography and obviously Mahlamäki has put a lot of hard work to his photos (with a bit of luck of course), which is praiseworthy.

http://www.hmkuvat.1g.fi/kuvat/LUONTO+%28maisemat%2C+el%E4imet+ym.%29/Nis%E4kk%E4%E4t/hirvi2.jpg

This link is to my absolute favorite photo of the exhibition. It’s awesome.

Now in the beginning of my blog that I write as a photography student for now, I’d like to share some feelings of admiration towards the book “Just Kids” written by Patti Smith. The book tells the love story of the musician-poetess Patti Smith and the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Not only was I blown away by the beyond belief life Smith and Mapplethorpe have been living in New York but also by their most honest love for art and for creating it. The book gave me a very big state of inspiration towards everything in life (that’s when you know you’ve read a good book) and also made me realize the genius of Smith’s music and Mapplethorpe’s art that has been rather distant to me until now. I read the book in my native language Finnish but I might buy the book in English so that I could truly enjoy Smith’s brilliant use of language. If you fancy the 60’s-70’s New York City then this is the book for you.