Based on the discussion between Juha Allan Ekholm and Harri Laakso after the seminar “Photography and Ethics” 20.10.2002-12-06

Harri Laakso: How could we broaden the themes of yesterday’s seminar? We wanted to leave room for discussion. But perhaps somebody felt there could’ve been a closing...

Juha Allan Ekholm: Closing whistle

HL: Yes. But maybe the open and unsolved nature of it is the main thing.

JAE: This year I’ve been sitting at two seminars, and the other one dealt with photography and humour and the other one photography and ethics. Could there be two phenomena that are more difficult to define? The main point is to look for it, to turn it over.

HL: It’s about moving in the borders, without an actual need to define. It’s a bit like the way you frequent areas that you call the borders of society. Is it about the conscious choice of a photographer or an attitude?

JAE: To me it’s both. But when the bus arrives to take me where I’m going to take my pictures, none of those questions matter. You must trust in your own ethics - in the fact that everybody’s got different ideas about ethics and that everybody brings along their own justification. Like I do in the suburbs. Otherwise you could not function.

HL: People always carry with themselves the question about justification - above all the question, not the answer. ***

JAE: In art I’m interested in projects that force you to constant revaluation of your attitude. Ambiguity is a thing of today. For example, Bertolucci put forth this idea in his film “1900”. You can’t watch the film without changing your view time after times. In my opinion, this has been understood in film long before photography...

HL: In an interview Scorsese praised Kubric’s film “Dr. Strangelove” because you could see from the first scenes that anything could happen in this movie, and he considered this sort of openness to be a fine and rare thing and feeling.

JAE: It’s great to address the audience this way. Making art is not in an ethical sense such a choice that would automatically rule out other points of view. Instead there are co-existing views, which can be valid at the same time. And the fact that in a dialogue about art you can’t just neatly knock off other interpretations like chess pieces off a table confuses some folk. I myself try to find and present things without a fixed point of approach. So that a thing is and isn’t at the same time in a certain way.

HL: According to Flusser the main question about responsibility is recognising the conflict between all responsibilities. Is the Finland, which you are trying to depict, conflicting?

JAE: I have a classical love-hate relationship with suburbs, which is contradictory. Everything gets not only more contradictory, but more difficult to photograph. I believe that for future generations of photographers these things will already be out of reach. Doors will close Myyrmanni after Myyrmanni [a shopping mall where a bomb blew up in Oct/02], Finnish society will become more American, so that people fortify themselves behind doors and if you can’t afford to live in an area where there are guards and Kalashnikovs you’re in trouble...

HL: The atmosphere changes.

JAE: When we went shopping for nappies and other stuff at a supermarket, there in the parking hall a thing like that happened. The baby was in the cart on the other side of the car...Soon you don’t even dare go to the other side of the car...Soon you don’t even dare go to a shopping mall in the suburbs. I mean, the only thing missing here is the sniper on the roof... ***

JAE: I think that an artist always steps on the toes of morality and ethics when working. I don’t know how else you could communicate with your work. Ethic is a sleeping beast that should be tickled so that it would wake up... And so the peace of mind of the viewers should be tickled as well. But by means that harm no-one.

HL: In the seminar Janne Seppänen nicely crystallised one thing, by combining Jukka Male’s point of view and what I, at the beginning, presented as Baudrillard’s “point of view”. That there are two different - and seemingly opposing - ways to care. On the other hand one can try to understand and help, on the other hand one can let the other person to be “the other”, something alien, which one doesn’t want to manipulate with the power involved in understanding. Both ways can be seen as ways to respect the other one.

JAE: This way of thinking can be put in that way, but I think that the most interesting thing is to work somewhere in the middle ground. Accepting the starting point that you can’t understand everything, and yet you can, at the same time. To show photos that are simultaneously both. That is the challenge. Otherwise we are left with only one choice.

HL: How is it put to practise?

JAE: Everybody solves that in their own way. My starting point has been an intention to present something, an aim, a question. But accepting at the same time the fact that the answer may not be the expected one. I think that the Finnish flag at the laundry is an example of what I mean.

HL: I think the strange thing about your flag picture is how the flag is in the basement and not up the flagpole where it should be. An underground flag - not one fluttering up in the air - is somehow a reverse image, where something has significantly dislocated.

JAE: That is one of my messages...But to accept that you can’t understand everything. That you are open to possibilities outside your own prior images. You can walk past them - or you can use them.

HL: In deed, one of the ideas of our ethics-seminar was that “un-understanding”, which leaves room for respect for others, would gain ground, even a little. ***

HL: Did the death of Diana affect you?

JAE: I heard about it in the suburbs where I was that time almost immediately after it had happened. When she was dead, even there the world seemed more empty a place. People were standing meaninglessly on the sidewalks and in front of stairs; the sorrow was collective. At the same time, the work of a photographer had become again a little more difficult. People are a little less trusting. I mean, that photography could in any way have a constructive purpose.

HL: One important theme of the seminar was the linking of the present moment with past events. Exceptional ones. Let’s go through some of your photographs one by one...

JAE: I don’t want kill my pictures, but I’ll tell you what can be told. For example that picture with the notes...One Saturday, when again nothing was happening, I went to visit this family whom I used to spend Saturday afternoons with that time. On the inside of a wardrobe door I found this note collection that the mother had kept in case something happened again, so that the note wouldn’t have to be written again. These notes spoke to me in an exceptionally strong manner. The door couldn’t be photographed as such, however. I shot one frame of that, went to my lab, made a print, cut off each note and reorganised them in the order I had read them. I arranged the notes so that they fit on a 6X9 negative and took a picture of it. I made a print and showed it the following Saturday. In the meantime three more notes had appeared.

HL: We have talked about quite distant things that affect the people in suburbs (and elsewhere), for example the death of Diana. In a way this note photo of yours is a totally contrasting a phenomenon, where such people who should be close (like mother and daughter) communicate in rather a distant-seeming manner.

JAE: The note photo tells about our way to communicate. Even within our families, we live increasingly separated lives and this progress probably won’t be stopped any more. Doors will close Myyrmanni after Myyrmanni and this is happening in Finland, the birth country of lottery winners, or how did it go. Many of my photographs tell in fact about something more common, which can be found at many different levels of society. Suburbia is merely a reference frame in the end.

HL: All the same, suburbs have a central role in your photographs. What are they like nowadays in your opinion?

JAE: A project was started somewhere in the 90’s that said that the way suburbs have been planned sucks, and that’s why people have problems and don’t feel at ease there. That they are concrete elements, and they lack all humanising sense. And so changes were made. The lifts resemble the lifts at tax-free boats, or the lifts of luxury hotels; there is marble and tiles and stuff like this. And the reality is that this has no effect on whether people are doing and feeling well or not.

HL: You mean it’s somehow cosmetic?

JAE: Cosmetic treatment can’t cure the psychic damage of Finnish society. The hell of Finnish society is a soft hell. Everything looks so good here on the outside that nobody can understand why the highest suicide percentage of Europe is found here, why are you doing so badly and why anybody is depressed at all. After all, everything’s fine here. Muzak plays at Kela (the Social Insurance Institution of Finland) when people go there to apply for housing benefit or unemployment allowance. Our hell is soft that way...When I have shown my pictures in the UK people have asked me if I’ve been depicting middle-class life. And I’ve wondered why a question like that...I think that if somebody on the dole here has a microwave oven at home and white walls, then that doesn’t have an effect on his well-being...We have the same hell, it only seems softer.

HL: Hell is always relative, a bit like the margin.

JAE: How else could the margin be defined? If somebody asked me today, or had asked yesterday, what living in the margins was, I probably would’ve answered that last week I travelled to Helsinki by bus earlier than usually, at 5:30 or something. And I really only woke up at the bus station there when I noticed that there were people there sleeping in sleeping-bags and blankets, before the long-distance bus station of Turku, like the homeless of London. So the margin is the Backlight, that neon light behind those sleepers, or that flashlight in that guy’s hand, who went through all the trash bins to see if there was food there. And this is in Turku, not in some London...That’s living in the margins.

HL: But you don’t photograph that...

JAE: No, I don’t photograph that. If I wanted look for the margins, I’d go about it in a different way. The idea about how you could try reach what’s at the centre by depicting that which is in the borders...The thought that these circumstances have to do with everyone of us...The result of that morning’s experience was the feeling that the things I photograph are pretty usual after all. When you understand about the margins, you understand the context of your own actions in another way. When I photograph the suburbs, I don’t photograph the margins. I depict a lifestyle that actually many share. I move about, but not in the margins.

HL: Once you said that the theme of Backlight, critical authenticity, perhaps describes most accurately that which you look for.

JAE: If I remember it right, I said that I still don’t know what word would best describe the sort of aspirations I have as well. It’s not documentary, and never has been. I belong to a generation of photographers that has never understood the lines between these definitions or even their meaning. I’ve never believed in the concept of documentary when talking about photography, but instead I’ve thought that a photographer wants to convey a certain view. The pompous-sounding definition of documentary can’t be saved by stressing the “subjective point of view”, however. These terms are just circling round the actual thing. But a term like authenticity or critical authenticity sounds good, because it leaves more room. I don’t think there is that one right word.

HL: Actually the question of authenticity is always implied in critical authenticity. The whole term is really a question.

JAE: We also spoke about photographs and heroes yesterday. I’ve been thinking that if you wanted to be a hero, there could be so many other easier ways. I wouldn’t place that kind of cape on my shoulders, or anyone else’s either. The photographer is only a part of a whole.

HL: Heroism is associated with certain purposefulness, tenacity and determination, but often uncertainty is more interesting...

JAE: They don’t exclude each other. Art and science differ in art’s capacity to be both certain and uncertain at the same time. I think that the metro-thing [photographs that Luc Delahaye took in the metro with a hidden camera] is a good example of that.

HL: Here we have two things mixed up: the photograph and the photographer’s approach - that which, according to Baudrillard, “allows the subject to be the Other”.

JAE: Baudrillard babbles...That’s exactly what it doesn’t allow - it only seems so. That guy stole those pictures. It’s not a question of what’s allowed and what’s not.

HL: But it’s a different tactic. The important question, in my opinion, is how to make the tactic visible. Are photographs condemned to be used in connection with words and so on. This really is the question that Ilona Reiners brought up in her lecture - a question of ethics.

JAE: The whole sphere of modern art deals with this question...for example the French metro-photographs don’t really offer much in a classical photographic context, but they are interesting in this other ethical context. You can make different choices concerning ethics, for instance, to reach the same objective, to ask if you can think in this way. But this is not only what photography asks, but all art...

HL: And the way we approach other people.

JAE: These are not separate issues: art, ethics, humanity... the way we are.