Photographers make journeys, they cover ground, and while some do this at the closest distance, in rooms or in studios, some make the journey itself a starting point, a way of defining what is possible – or rather of not defining it, of making their own map, allowing lines to cross. So it is the sense of a fortunate encounter that defines such work and the work of Arja Hyytiäinen in particular, the sudden, brief overlap of lives and places, then gone again. The journey is endless, tracking across continents, the destination some-place between where you arrived and where you left, in the air. Her pictures, cumulatively, are a record of the distance she has put behind her, the short intensity of lives touching, of new, unfamiliar places and they also look toward where she has yet to go. Motion is the catalyst. They are history pictures too, measuring the weight of Europe’s past on an individual scale, intersections again, the stage for a long-running drama and for those we have yet to write, or the one we are writing now, as Hyytiäinen’s pictures show, the work in progress, the tension, the pause, the curtain going down. For her actors it is life and death, the performance is their own – and hers too maybe, forging a new connection between aspects of reality otherwise distant, and the journey continues, a scattered, disconsolate memorial for the seemingly insignificant, passing stuff of life, foggy plumes of breath in the cold night, all the shadings of desire, of grief, the transient meetings, hurried departures; this journey (and these pictures) are a way of marking a path that might never be followed, but we all know where it goes… See more here and here.
