Notes on a Place by Kimmo Metsäranta
A building’s primary reason for being is to serve humans: to put them in their place and give them an address, warm them, shelter them, care for them, provide them with food and commodities—to thus in every way enable their long, superior, ubiquitous existence.
…
When all traces of people are removed from pictures, you begin to add people to them in your mind. But if we reverse that automatic process and try to think another way, images void of people can become cornucopias.
—Hanna Weselius, epilogue of the book Notes on a Place
Notes on a Place by Kimmo Metsäranta describes modified architectural cityscapes. In the series places become artificial, and their three-dimensionality is lost. The everyday scene presents itself as an unusual, stage-like imitation of itself. The images balance between surrealism and realism.
Kimmo Metsäranta (born 1978) is a Helsinki-based visual artist working with photography. His work has been widely exhibited in Finland and abroad, e.g. The Finnish Museum of Photography, Kunsthalle Helsinki, EMMA - Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Klompching Gallery in New York, Somerset House in London, and the Voies Off festival in Arles.
Metsäranta has graduated with a Master of Arts degree from Aalto University in 2015, and he has been nominated for the Fotofinlandia and EmmaPrize awards.
The series Notes on a Place was captured in Finland and Iceland between 2015 and 2022.
