MAGIC, METAPHOR AND FIGURE
- THE MINDFUL LANDSCAPES OF KALLE KATAILA


Kalle Kataila is a Finnish landscape photographer. His work, Landscapes and Contemplations, shows solitary figures gazing into landscapes: urban, rural and some quite surreal.


Beautifully conceived and executed, hies realise a very simple, effective concept. Reminiscent of Romantic landscapes such as those of Caspar David Friedrich, these images stand before us inviting us into their quietude.


Compositionally, Kataila maintains simplicity. The figure occupies centre frame: our view, thus most closely mirroring theirs, the landscape most fully surrounding them. Viewed from above the figure's eye-level we see the landscape laid out before them, the horizon passing above head height embedding them in the scene.


On Flusser's analysis images have the quality of representing magical time. Through the scanning action of the eye in reading the image Before becomes equivalent to After, After equivalent to Before. Rather than temporally spaced occurrences, a stream, events happening one following on from the other, in the photograph, as in other image images, a statis is presented in which events attain simultaneity. Causal relationships likewise change, every element of the image relating to and related to every other: a state of magic.


Thus, the figure is the landscape, the landscape is the figure. We might further expand the notion to equate other complimentary pairs, in this case particularly the inner and the outer. The figure might be viewed as in the landscape, and so simultaneously the landscape within the figure, as mental state. That figure in the landscape, minimally identifiable, faceless, seen from behind, is suggestive of a more universal identity inviting the viewer to enter the figure, the landscape. Viewer and figure, in the meditative space of the image might attain equivalence and the viewer, being privy to the inner world of the figure, represented in the landscape, becomes that figure. Thus in these images man achieves a new integrity with the landscape, and by analogy the world. The viewer, transported into the meditative, magical space and state of the image, becomes the world.



Peter Dixie, Photographer and international educator based in Shanghai, China
21/4/2009


Philosophy of Photography/Vilem Flusser/ ISBN-10:1861890761/ ISBN-13:978-1861890764/ Reaktion Books (October 2000)

Landscapes and Contemplations

 

The only true source of art is our hearts, the language of the infallibly pure soul. A work of art that does not flow from this source can only be artificial. Every authentic work of art is conceived in a holy hour (and born in a happy moment, often without the artist themselves being aware of it, for the internal impulse of the heart. 

Caspar David Friedrich
 
Kalle Kataila is a young Finnish photographer that developed in the artistic unity called “the school of Helsinki” which includes artists that express themselves through the language of video and photography.
Kataila immortalizes suggestive natural landscapes that pertain to different geographic realities.After inheriting the notion of panorama from the Romantic movement, intended as nature to be admired and contemplated, he dedicated himself to immortalizing it thanks to an exemplary means, that of the photo camera.

The soft and diffused light of the first hours of the day give each shot a great sense of tranquillity and a pantheistic immersion even if it deals with a glacier or an expanse of snow as far as the eye can see.Naked and silent city horizons with the setting of the sun, remembering Cormac McCarthy, with cold and unsaturated colours, and always thanks to an immersive light never seem apocalyptic.
The spectacularity depicted or perhaps it is better to say “written with light” is a reflective mirror of the emotional experience of who is contemplating it. Photography has always had a double connotation, artistic as well as a documentary nature. From its beginning, attention was focused on the faithful restitution of the captured image, so as to permit reflection around the visible components, but the stylistic value was quickly discovered as well.
 
A beautiful sight is beautiful in and of itself and does not need disguises nor diadems to complete it or to render it more persuasive. What is certain is that the slice of “stolen reality” is filtered by the eye of who photographs it. And so from simple photography, one arrives to photographic works where the interpretation of the photographer, bringer of stories, identity, culture and character intervenes in a clear and recognizable way.Kataila’s work, Landscapes and Contemplations, shows solitary silhouettes whose gaze is fixed on boundless views that stand out in front of them.
The figure always occupies the central position within the composition resulting in being totally surrounded by the landscape, immersed in the view.The people have their backs to the observer. We look at them; they look in front of them. What exactly are they gazing at?
 
The landscape, a metaphoric future or are they simply turning their backs on the past in hopes of new times?There is no way of knowing, but the impression is certainly not ruinous. It comes naturally to me to think of that creative delight that were the “panoramas” of the late 1700’s - full, 360 degree, circular views illustrating historical events, cities, rivers or mountains. The visitors stopped in the center of a circular space, observing the panoramas that were painted, astutely illuminated from behind to make them even more verisimilar.
 
The Irish painter, Robert Barker, created the first cylindrical panoramas and patented it in 1787. People went crazy over this, they loved to immerge themselves in this world and let themselves be stunned by his vision! A couple of decades later, the great German artist Caspar David Friedrich painted “The Monk by the Sea” (Der Mönch am Meer). This time the spectator does not find himself smack in the middle of a composition but enters it thanks to the intermediate presence of a figure that occupies the lower part of the canvas, where the shore meets the sea. The gaze of the man, thought to be a monk, is lost in the choppy sea, under a dark and immense sky that, against the rules of proportion, occupies three quarters of the painting. The dark clothing that he wears camouflage the figure within the scenery that surrounds him, getting lost in the immensity, a small and discrete presence (it could depict the artist himself) in front of such a vast sight.Kalle Kataila certainly has in common with Fiedrich, the choices of suggestive panoramas, sometimes spectacles of nature, sometimes views mutated by human hand, sometimes indefinable visions and unwriteable to any latitude, suspended in nothing, given to the exalted visual perspective.
 
Kataila evokes that romantic spirit that invites the viewer to immerge themselves in the timeless tranquillity of these places, now urban, now rural, now Nordic or surreal. All the constituent elements come together perfectly in a harmony that does not foresee dominating situations, but where man is the scenery and the scenery is within man. So it comes naturally to identify oneself with that silent observer that seems to be nothing other than the world he is gazing at and which is his mental state. Observer and figure, in the meditative space of the image, reach equivalence, and the observer, not having his figure depicted in the world, appropriates himself of the human image in the center of the photograph.

In this game of returns and suggestions, the spectator, as if by catharsis, realizes his status of completeness, made of images already belonging to him, to his historical and visual memory, now translated into works of great beauty.
 
Monica Trigona, Curator

FROM HELSINKI SCHOOL BOOK VOL 3.


Taking up the tradition of romantic landscape painting, Kalle Kataila thematizes man, quiescent and motionless, tarrying before nature’s grandiose scenery. In more recent works, Kataila not only finds his atmospheric landscapes at spectacular or exotic sites, but also in urban localities. Yet Kataila always shows man in lonely places, under a broad stretch of sky and a low-lying horizon. The artist, from an elevated standpoint and from a certain distance, observes his back-view figures as they are caught up in nature’s spectacle. In contrast to the German romantic painter, Caspar David Friedrich, the head of the figure hardly even once rises above the horizon line. Whereas Friedrich submerges his characters mentally in an imaginative heavenly sphere, Kataila’s figure is fully rooted to the earth. As in romantic painting, the landscape could very well serve as a mirror of one’s state of mind. Meanwhile the pictures inquire into present-day nature religion and ask why man seeks out exalted vantage points, why faraway natural wonders?


Ever since Romanticism, the prerequisite for an enthusiastic delight in nature has been a mastery of, and control over, nature through civilization, a phenomenon at first viewed positively. But more recent photography especially—starting with American “New Topographics”—has condemned humanity’s way of dealing with nature as being mere consumerism and has, above all, shown the wounds that man has inflicted on nature. However, different from this movement that has molded landscape photography since the 1970s, Kataila does not stylize man openly as an antagonist hostile to nature. More exactly, his figures have a touch of the vulnerable, the solitary and the deeply melancholy about them.


Katrin Hiller von Gaertringen

Gallery Taik, Berlin

CONSCIOUS LANDSCAPE

 
In the photographs of Kalle Kataila we find ourselves in a landscape, in a space and in the experience of space. The sky and the desert, mountains, forest and water, all these are part of the space and the sense of space in the pictured moment. The scale of the space is provided by a person in the landscape, often the photographer himself. Empty beach chairs, buildings and a lookout platform add their own human scale to the landscape. Another element creating a sense of scale is that many of the places in the photographs are far away; geographical location has become a particular object of experience. The viewer does not know the exact location, the essential thing is the experience, shared with the photographer, of the photographed place.
 
A landscape has no natural centre, it is everywhere around us. It is therefore impossible to frame a landscape, to frame space and the sense of space. What Kataila has allowed into his photographs was decided at the moment of exposure. Outside the photograph, the space and the experience of space continued in the place where the photograph was taken. Awareness is greater than a photographed landscape.
In the photographs, the coldness, humidity and dryness of the landscape, the evening and the night, all these are part of the sensory data of the landscape, material for its conceptualisation. The photographs are beautiful aesthetically, but their beauty also contains an element of questioning. Tower  seems to be asking, what is happening here? Contemplation, Guhyaloka wants to know how long this landscape will survive. Our responsibility for the landscape is not abolished by aesthetic beauty. Not even when the viewer's place is vacant, as in White Crest  and Fall. The landscape exists even without the viewer, although we are in part responsible for its survival.
 
In Kalle Kataila's exhibition Conscious Landscape, the responsibility accorded to humanity for the landscape implies more than mere contemplation. Consciousness of the self (which also applies to those viewing the photographs) and of the landscape is also consciousness of existence, consciousness wherein the boundary between the observer and the observed becomes fluid. There is a constant movement of biological and aesthetic interaction between the landscape and the viewer. Breathing is the most important thing for survival. Conscious breathing is presence within the self and within the landscape.
 
Kari Alatalo

Introduction 2008

 

Kalle Kataila's latest landscape photos are landscapes devoid of any metaphors. Kataila has constructed the photos using aesthetics, harmony, distance and division of the image into clean lines. The essence of the landscapes is expressed aptly in a line from Eeva-Liisa Manner's poem Speculation:


"And the world that changes a little every day (The mountains seem ever more like mountains, the sea like the sea)"


The people in Kataila's photos have turned their backs to the viewer. What are they looking at? What are they seeing? They are looking at the sun, the moon or a darkening horizon, but perhaps also towards the future. Are they perhaps wondering how humanity has arrived in the current world situation, or are they thinking about their own lives at the moment of the photo? Perhaps we might even ask, what is the past they do not wish to see, and have turned their backs upon? Is the act of turning one's back an attempt to find shelter in a harmonious landscape and one's private experience of it? By putting himself into the landscape, Kataila alludes to the photographic tradition wherein the photo is seen as being always connected to the moment of its exposure. Kataila not only depicts his landscapes, he also exposes himself to them. This role cannot but affect the questions asked by the young man looking for answers. Why am I standing here, watching the moon, what is it I feel in doing so?


An early starting point for Kataila's photography was the notion of landscape, inherited from the romantic movement, in which nature was an object of admiration. People would travel long distances to see some particular view, and the emotions evoked by it were at times almost like a religious revelation. This mode of looking put the viewer in contact with the landscape. The landscape became a mirror that reflected the viewer's emotional experience, and also affirmed the viewer's sense of unity with nature.


Another early starting point for Kataila was the representation of space. In the series Avara kosketus, the sky seems to go on forever beyond the boundaries of the photo. The figure standing or sitting beneath the sky seems to be experiencing a moment without beginning or end. Although these photos can be said to depict landscapes, they are not about vantage points or sights in the usual sense of the words. The sites have been discovered in the spirit of romanticism, while the photos themselves seem to reveal an experience in which presence in the landscape is more important than the place where the experience takes place.


These early starting points are present also in Kalle Kataila's latest landscape photos, in the background, over the horizon or in the air. Using photography's inherent means of image construction, the photos forefront the experience of the sky as sky, the ground as ground, as well as the human figure's experience taking place in a mundane setting, without any interpretation to make it sublime.


Kari Alatalo, Art critic

Esittely 2008 (FI)


Valokuvaaja Kalle Katailan uusimmat kuvatut maisemat on maisemia ilman vertauskuvia. Valokuvien rakentamisen työkaluina ovat esteettisyys, harmonia, etäisyys ja kuvapinnan selkeisiin linjoihin jakaminen. Valokuvien maiseman olemusta kuvaa hyvin katkelma Eeva-Liisa Mannerin runosta Spekulaatio:


"Ja maailma joka muuttuu hiukan joka päivä (vuoret näyttävät yhä enemmän vuorilta, meri mereltä)"


Katailan valokuvissa henkilöt seisovat selin katsojaan. Mitä ja minne katsojalle selkänsä kääntäneet ihmiset katsovat? He katsovat kohti aurinkoa, kuuta tai sammuvaa taivaanrantaa, mutta ehkä myös kohti tulevaa. Pohtivatko he sitä, miten ihminen on joutunut vallitsevaan maailman tilanteeseen, vai pohtivatko he elämäänsä kuvanottohetkellä? Voisiko kysyä millainen on se menneisyys, jota he eivät tahdo katsoa, ja jolle he ovat kääntäneet selkänsä? Onko selän kääntäminen yritys suojautua harmoniseen maisemaan ja omaan kokemukseensa siitä? Sijoittamalla itseänsä maisemaan, sen katsojaksi ja kokijaksi, Kataila viittaa valokuvan traditioon jossa ajatellaan valokuva olevan sidoksissa aina kuvaamishetkeen. Kataila ei vain kuvaa maisemaa vaan on altistanut myös itsensä sen osaksi. Tämä rooli vaikuttaa kysymyksiin vastauksia etsivän nuorenmiehen osalta. Miksi seison katsomassa kuutamoa ja mitä koen kuuta katsoessani?Kalle Katailan valokuvien varhaisena lähtökohtana on ollut romantiikan ajan maiseman kokemiskäsitys, jossa luonto oli ihailun kohde. Maisemakohteita saatettiin matkustaa katsomaan pitkänmatkan takaa, ja niiden äärellä saatettiin tavoitella uskonnollista tunnekokemusta. Tämä katsomisentapa yhdisti katsojan katsottavaan maisemaan, maisemasta tuli peili joka kuvasi katsojan tunnekokemusta, ja samalla vahvisti katsojan yhteenkuuluvuutta luonnon kanssa.


Toinen varhainen lähtökohta Katailan valokuvaukselle on ollut tilan esittäminen. Avara kosketus-sarjan valokuvissa taivas vaikuttaa jatkuvan kuvan ulkopuolelle äärettömiin. Taivaan alla seisova tai istuva hahmo on kuvattu kokemaan alutonta ja loputonta olemassaolon hetkeä. Vaikka näistä valokuvista voisi sanoa, että ne kuvaavat maisemaa, ne eivät kuitenkaan kuvaa näköalapaikkoja tai matkakohteita niiden yleisessä merkityksessä. Valokuvauspaikat ovat löytyneet romantiikan hengessä, mutta itse valokuvat pyrkivät kertomaan kokemuksesta jossa läsnäolo maisemassa on tärkeämpää kuin itse paikka, missä kokemus tapahtuu.


Nämä varhaiset lähtökohdat ovat läsnä myös Kalle Katailan uusien maisemavalokuvien taustalla, horisontissa tai ilmanalassa. Uusimmissa valokuvissa nousee, valokuvan rakentamisen keinoin, pääosaan kokemukset taivaasta taivaana, maasta maana ja kuvatun henkilön kokemus arkisessa miljöössä, ilman kokemusta ylevöittävää tulkintaa.


Kari Alatalo

Kuvataidekriitikko