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PENTTI SAMMALLAHTI

18.02.12 - 14.04.12

GALLERY
www.amber-online.com

For the beauty of his image making, for his darkroom craftsmanship, for his constant innovation in print and publication, Pentti Sammallahti has become a benchmark figure in Finnish photography. sea, but whether in Scandinavia, Finland, Estonia, Russia, or elsewhere, he is drawn to the margins and records the relationships of people and animals to their environments. Describing himself as a wanderer, he likes the nature of the great north, the silence, the cold, the

Sammallahtis photographs take the viewer into and beyond everyday experience. There is a gentle

humour in his universe - the dogs stretching, the birds balancing a branch, a vulture looming over a sleeping figure. He represents an alternative to the frenetic rhythms of contemporary life and to the adulation of rapid change, but each photograph invites the viewer into something deeper a teasing out of the narrative through its smallest details.

There is a shamanistic sense of what Cartier-Bresson called the decisive moment, caught in and taken out of time; a world in part revealed by the animals, which wander in and out of the images. His use of dogs, in particular, whilst commenting on human experience, challenges mans claim for the precision in the moment of capture and the meticulous craftsmanship of each print.

centrality in a vision of an earth, which, by its nature, must be shared. It is a vision inseparable from

He is also known as a passionate seeker of the perfect (mechanical) printing method. His own innovative techniques and the reintroduction of the portfolio form have re-awakened broader interest in published photographic art in Finland. As a craftsman, Sammallahti has taken the tradition of the artist book forward, creating individual works in which the photographer is responsible for the whole: the original images, the making of prints, layout, design and typography, reproduction and photographers in Finland.

often the actual printing process. He has influenced and taught a whole generation of documentary

This exhibition draws extensively on The Russian Way, his largest single body of work, which was Europe, Africa and Asia.

published as a portfolio in 1996. That selection is complemented by work from his travels throughout

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