MARJA PIRILÄLight Diaries 26.4.2025 – 18.5.2025
The First Book, 2008/2025pigment ink print
102x145 cm
Light is the starting point for everything in my work; it’s the foundation on which I build my practice. The collision of incorporeal light with tangible objects is what fascinates me most in photography. It’s what I’ve been shooting in the darkness of camera obscura for decades.
While
working using the slow camera obscura technique, I was also shooting my Light
Diaries series, in which the canvases for the light were blank notebooks. Their
white pages were like screens on which I recorded thoughts, emotions and
memories using light. I reached out to a place beyond the grasp of my words.
Because I observe the world through the eyes of both a photographer and a
biologist, my works also deal with my personal relationship with nature and the
role of the human species in terms of biodiversity.
Since the
first image of the series, The First Book (2008/2025), my
work has become increasingly simplified and abstract, taking on characteristics
of metaphysical art (pittura metafisica in Italian) over the years. In addition
to the photographs, the series includes the video installation Light Notes
(2024) and the three-dimensional work The Wind Book (2025).
Marja
Pirilä
Photographer
Marja Pirilä (b.1957) graduated in 1986, both as a
photographer from the University of Art and Design Helsinki (now Aalto
University) and as a biologist with an MSc in ecological zoology from the
University of Helsinki. Pirilä’s extensive body of work encompasses series made
using the camera obscura technique. Her work and contributions to the
development of this rare technology and its creative applications has won her
awards including the Alfred Kordelin Prize in 2020 and the Finnish State Prize
for Photographic Art in 2000. Since 1987, Pirilä’s works have been
exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across Finland, Europe and Asia, as
well as North and South America. In 2024, she was invited by the Finnish Art
Society to hold a retrospective exhibition, Because of Light, at
Kunsthalle Helsinki, and the same year she was invited to take part in the
Tokyo Photographic Art Museum’s exhibition Remembrance beyond images.
Marja
Pirilä has published seven photographic books, two of which are retrospective
photography books: Because of Light (2024) and Carried by Light
(2014). Her works feature in several collections, such as those of The Finnish
Museum of Photography, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, HUS Art Collection, Finnish
State Art Commission, Serlachius Art Museum (Mänttä), Saastamoinen Foundation
(Espoo) and the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation collection (Rovaniemi).
