SONJA SUOMINEN Transition Photographs 11.3 - 29.3.2009 This body of work is part of my MFA studies in the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. The first part of the work was shown in the Degree Exhibition (21.5 - 15.6.2008) in Tennispalatsi. The thematic premise of this work is Maternity and being with a child. I have made a conscious decision to avoid the trivial and obvious mother-child notions to create more intriguing, painterly images of a little child's life. I wanted to make approachable, expressive and less clinical photography. Using a technically limited camera phone while photographing a child has brought an unpredictability and coincidence to the work, and viewing and selecting the imagery has often been aesthetically pleasing. I have previously worked with this theme using different camera formats, but the reason I chose a mobile phone was, in part, practical but also because of the specific characteristics of the medium. My interest in this format has not only been technical but also cultural and aesthetic. The challenge in using a camera phone involves working with the difficulties in controlling the colours, light and timing, the delay when taking the picture, the distortion caused by the plastic optics, and the size of the pixel when enlarging the image, which fragments and enlivens the surface. This supposed "bad" quality recalls old discoloured childhood pictures; it also lends a painterly effect, the pixels resembling Impressionistic brush strokes. Pictures taken with a camera phone are lacking the essential depth, emphasising the surface of the image. The viewing distance then plays a major role when looking at the photo; from afar, the image looks like an ordinary bad quality photo which is still clearly refering to its subject. On closer inspection, however, the subject remains visible but the presence of the enlarged pixels causes the viewer to examine the overall effect, ie, the smaller squares contained in the larger fragmented squares. Thus, the surface is a part of the image or, rather, the surface is the image. Supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation Sonja Suominen |