Grounding

Born in 1974 in Turku, Finland, Arja Hyytiäinen's career is that of a free photographer, perfectly in tune with an era in which documentary photography has continued to renew itself. A graduate of the Prague Academy of Photography, her experience has already been imbued with adventure and humanism after two years immersed in a village on the borders of Russia, wandering around Eastern Europe where she met strange characters adrift, young women reflecting the photographer, tired peasants and interned men whose gaze makes a lasting impression.
In all these series, street work, posed portraits, reports, landscapes and diaries are intermingled indiscriminatingly. And already, this form of intimacy runs through the body of work because Arja’s heart palpitates, and ours too of course, through the other.

Awarded the Kodak Prize for Photography Criticism in 2006, the cold is first depicted in this work, then the thick snow is chased away by the heat of Marseille and finally by that of the Vendée, where the Agence Vu photographer settled permanently in 2010 in a large estate in the middle of nature, surrounded by animals.

It is an understatement to say that the scenery around her changes, and yet there is an obvious continuity in the quest that Arja Hyytiäinen has been leading for more than fifteen years: to integrate the world around her through the act of photography, an act in which she has preserved all the skill required for working with film, from the shooting to the prints that she makes herself in a darkroom.

And there is a new character who evolves in this fairy-tale setting: her daughter, whose childhood Arja will document both in France and in Finland, in search of an identity mixed between two countries that end up merging. But this work is in no way inward-looking; on the contrary, it seeks universal echoes in this childhood intoxication, in the memories of buzzing summers, then gradually develops a more general scope.
This is how the series Grounding was born, a term that evokes a necessary return to the earth from which we all come. Freely bringing together different periods of Arja Hyytiäinen's autobiographical work, humans, animals, rocks and trees are treated on an equal footing in a writing that is both delicate and profound, fragile and rooted in the power of nature.

Arja tells us about the passing of time, the scent of fire and rosemary, the carefree insouciance that blends with the blond mane. There is no angelism in this work, however, because Grounding, by hiding nothing of the human condition, evokes both the dreamlike happiness of being in the world and the fear that it will all end up slipping away.

Marie Sordat, exhibition curator                
Translation: Louise Jablonowska

© Arja Hyytiäinen, Hold on, serie Ile d’enfance, 2018, 20 x 30 cm / © Arja Hyytiäinen, Coq qui vole, serie Ile d’enfance, 2018, 24 x 30 cm / © Arja Hyytiäinen, sans titre, serie martan laulu Esnandes, 2012, 28 x 28 cm 

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