PRESS RELEASE
Press photos are available!Photographic gallery Hippolyte
Kalevankatu 18 B, FI-00100 Helsinki
+3589-612 33 44, www.hippolyte.fi
Opening hours: Tue-Fri 1217, Sat-Sun 1216
NANNA SAARHELO
Sleep with me
4.-27.5.2007
Nanna Saarhelo's exhibition Sleep with Me presents photos of sleeping people. The photos are ranged in series, showing sleepers and the bed directly from above. Saarhelo asked people if they could be photographed at night in their sleep, with the photographer herself sleeping beside them. The camera was timed to take a photo every thirty minutes, when the artist and the other person in the photo were both asleep.
"Sleep with Me is a comment on the photographer's responsibility in taking pictures of people. I have deliberately chosen a situation where the subject of the photo is in a vulnerable state of sorts, incapable of self-control. What happens when the photographer puts herself in the same state, under the clinical eye of the camera, and there is no one taking the picture? The photographer makes herself susceptible to the same treatment as the 'subject' of the photo, adding complexity to the one-way portrait situation.
Sleep with Me is my attempt to address the complex relationship between photographer and subject, where the former easily makes the latter a victim to his or her own agendas. In the contemporary flood of images, photographs are used efficiently to maintain and reproduce market-driven ideologies, and the photo of a person functions as a special point of identification. My purpose is to produce anti-portraits as an indirect analysis of photography as an instrument.
The work also contains references to human relations sleeping together is a situation of trust and unconscious dialogue both between friends and strangers. Choreographies emerge during the night, with the movements of the two sleepers sometimes seeming almost synchronised. Yet they are present in the world of dream, beyond the realm of photography. Although the photos point towards individual people, it is difficult to make any valid assumptions about their identity. The notion of the closeness and quality of photographed human relations thus becomes subject to the viewer's own associations and experiences."
Nanna Saarhelo: from series "Sleep with me", Pihla, 2007 (detail)
