PHOTOGRAPHIC GALLERY HIPPOLYTE
Kalevankatu 18 B, 00100 Helsinki, Finland
+358 9 612 33 44, www.hippolyte.fi
Opening hours: Tue–Fri midday–5pm, Sat–Sun midday–4pmISMO LUUKKONEN
Kerrostumia - Layers
7 December 2007 – 5 January 2008
(The Gallery will be closed 25–26 December 2007 and 1 January 2008).
As long as mankind has trod the face of the earth, we have left traces of ourselves on it. The land is inscribed with signs of human activity, from footpaths to motorways, from trapping pits to shopping malls. The landscape is layered. Each era leaves its own marks, gradually buried under the marks of subsequent centuries. The signs left in the landscape by people tell us about the interaction of human society with the environment.
I am interested in the oldest signs of culture in the landscape: prehistoric burial sites and settlements, ancient castles and rock paintings. The mere awareness of the long history of a site alters the observer's relationship to it, even when there are no visible signs of the past left in the landscape. A picture on a rock made six thousand years ago opens up a dizzying time span between today's mobile phone user and the Stone Age hunter-gatherer. People themselves have probably not changed very much, but the human society we have built has.
I take photographs of places that contain traces of human prehistoric activity. I do not try to recreate the ancient environment, but shoot the locations as they are today. The most visible temporal layer in my pictures is not the past, but the present. The signs of ancient times are depicted against a contemporary landscape.
Over the millennia, prehistoric sites have become parts of their settings. In some places this link is so strong that the landscape is defined by the ancient monument. On the other hand, there is a visible conflict between the contemporary landscape and the monument. The aims and means of contemporary society are not always commensurate with the oldest strata of the cultural landscape.
Pictures of prehistoric monuments tell us about ancient man, his values, and society. But they also tell us about present man and society. The values and choices of individuals and society are reflected in the landscape. In the sensitive environments around prehistoric monuments, the visibility of this reflection is multiplied many times over.
Ismo Luukkonen
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Ismo Luukkonen (b. 1969) lives and works in Turku. He graduated as photographer from the Arts and Media Programme at Turku Polytechnic in 1995 and earned his MA at the University of Art and Design Helsinki in 1999. Luukkonen has worked as Senior Teacher of Photography at the Arts Academy of the Turku University of Applied Sciences since 2004. His work with ancient landscapes is also part of his postgraduate studies at the University of Art and Design Helsinki.
Ismo Luukkonen: Stone-Age rock carving site, Ribeira de Piscos, Foz Côa, Portugal (2001)----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For further information and press images, please contact:
Petronella Grönroos, Exhibitions co-ordinator / Photographic Gallery Hippolyte, +358 9 612 33 44, firstname.lastname@hippolyte.fi
