Petri juntunen - at the heart of it all

Inbunden bok. Hatje Cantz, Berlin. 2018. 88 sidor.

Mycket gott skick. photo book.
Petri Juntunen in his most recent publication At The Heart of it All visually explores the question of how to measure the volume of existence. However existential this might seem initially, Juntunen's interpretation of it ranges from stones to places seemingly forgotten, using light and shades of darkness as a means to capture the history of their passing. Having spent most of my adult life in Finland, I found Juntunen's choice of light to build a bridge between past and present quite natural. The Nordic region in general fine-tunes your senses to the ever-changing seasons; whether you like it or not, it's a part of your daily life. Finding that internal balance between the solstices and equinoxes plays an important role in the Nordic psyche. Juntunen's photographs are not about the object itself but the process of perception and how he leads us to experience it. His choice of places can be anywhere. He stages the non-specific and uses it to create stories without endings, interludes that introduce what was to what can be. His images, stripped down to their material essence, encapsulate a feeling of time standing still. The photographs, with their velvet-like aura, emerge from a shrouded darkness and become time capsules marked with the patterns of their ageless passage.
His world is one that stands stoically silent, invoking shadowless memories that are sometimes heavier then the foundations they are built upon. Nevertheless, as a whole these pictures work as peepholes into another frame of mind, binding the viewer to a presence stronger than faith, illuminating a voluminous echo of the here and now.