Published by Hatje Cantz. Text by Ritva Röminger-Czako.
Collectors from around the world are scrambling for photographs from Scandinavia, and the work of Janne Lehtinen (born 1970), one of Finland's best young photographers, has been attracting attention for several years now. Lehtinen's latest book, following Sacred Bird (2006) and The Descendants (2008), is set in a small city in Finland. Between January and December 2006, the photographer prowled its streets at night, camera in hand, capturing such melancholic images as a father getting off work at dawn following a long night shift. But in Lehtinen's work, fact and fiction blend together; real events from the past are revived in staged images. Thus, as in his earlier, autobiographically tinged series of works, the images collected in Night Shift reveal poignant memories of childhood and make visible the bonds between generations.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Preface by Jan Kaila. Text by Juha Lehtinen, Oiva Lehtinen.
Janne Lehtinen’s bleak yet arresting photographs of his hometown in the south of Finland are reproduced in this slim, elegant volume. In this new autobiographical project, Lehtinen takes us to Lehtiskylä, where the locals believe that everyone who comes to stay will meet with a sad, usually sinister and absolutely inevitable fate. The images and their accompanying memories--his sick uncle's little bottles of pills, a corpse floating in the river, the last meal eaten by his old horse, a schoolmate’s accident--do not promise better things to come, yet there is a certain beauty to the “curse” of Lehtiskylä. This very personal, melancholy album of photographs records the journey of Lehtinen and his cousin to their childhood house and other places of their youth.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Essay by Didier Mouchel.
The dream of flight is as old as humanity. Icarus dreamt of it, Leonardo da Vinci worked at it, and since the middle of the last century, a select few have been realizing it in outer space. Finnish photographer Janne Lehtinen has also dreamed of defying gravity. His Sacred Bird series presents quietly powerful portraits of the artist about to take off, wearing a range of peculiar apparatuses--standing on a hillside waiting for a breeze to lift a pair of dragonfly-like wings or crouching on a high-dive over a snow-covered lake in what look like the wings from a child's fairy costume--attempts as absurd as they are stirring. Lehtinen's work is complicated by the fact that his father is a well-known glider pilot: these photographs are not just an homage to the myth of flying and to the landscapes to which Lehtinen finds himself tethered, but also an autobiographical investigation.
Janne Lehtinen
Janne Lehtinen: Sacred Bird