The photographer Jorma Puranen has been working in Lapland for years, so when he found a dusty box of 19th-century images of the Sámi in an archive in Paris, he decided to take them back to their native land in what he calls an imaginary homecoming Working in a photographic archive is a strange experience: you are faced with boxes and boxes of images of dead people, even entire nations. At times, these material objects - faded, ripped and worn-out photographs of people long deceased - become vivid and strongly present. The faces are either un-named, or accompanied with careless translations and, frequently, misunderstandings. Some faces look familiar, as though one had seen them in other archives or on the pages of books.      In the spring of 1988, I visited the Sámi poet Nils-Aslak Valkeapää in Pättikä, near Enontekiö, in Finnish Lapland. He showed me a series of black-and-white photographs, portraits of Sámi people, which he used in his book Beaivi Áhcázan (The Sun My Father). It was obvious to me that these exceptionally beautiful pictures were taken by a skilled portraitist, and I learned that Valkeapää had discovered them in the Musée de L'Homme, Paris. When I happened to be in Paris myself, to satisfy my curiosity, I visited the picture archive at the museum. The pictures had been taken in 1884, during Prince Roland Bonaparte's expedition to Lapland, by a French photographer called G. Roche. The resulting collection in the Musée de L'Homme comprises some 400 negatives, 250 of them portraits.      Identifying and locating the people photographed by Bonaparte's expedition was eased by the thorough notes that survive. Many of the surnames sounded familiar: the sitters were evidently ancestors of the various families that I had got to know in Lapland in the course of two decades of work there. During this and subsequent visits to the archive at the Musée de L'Homme, I developed a strong need to make something of the images recorded by Bonaparte's expedition. Although I also used numerous other sources, the Paris collection provided the foundation for the project that became Imaginary Homecoming.      Imaginary Homecoming concerns temporal and spatial distance. On the one hand, a museum located at the Place de Trocadéro; on the other, the expansive fells of the province of Finnmarken in Norway. The present is juxtaposed with the year 1884. Imaginary Homecoming attempts a dialogue between the past and the present; between two landscapes and historical moments, but also between two cultures. To bridge this distance, I tried to return those old photographs to their source, restoring the representations to the place where they originated, and from where they had been severed. To achieve this metaphorical return, I began by rephotographing the images of the Sámi. I developed them on graphic film and mounted them on acrylic boards, which I arranged in the landscape where they had once been taken. I worked on the pictures included in Imaginary Homecoming between 1991 and 1997. A landscape is speechless. Day by day, its only idiom is the sensory experience afforded by the biological reality, the weather conditions, and the actions that take place in the environment. However, we can also assume that a landscape has another dimension: the potential but invisible field of possibilities nourished by everyday perceptions, lived experiences, different histories, narratives and fantasies. In fact, any understanding of landscape entails a succession of distinct moments and different points of view. The layeredness of landscape, in other words, forms part of our own projection. Every landscape is also a mental landscape.      In Imaginary Homecoming I have sought to understand Lapland as a historical space that has been inhabited and shaped by the Sámi. This historical landscape also consists of the narratives and histories it contains - a point that is highlighted in my pictures. The open, void-like landscape provides an ideal stage on which these hidden narratives can be played out. Many of the pictures in Imaginary Homecoming have been reconstructed on the northernmost, barren and deserted-looking heights of Ruija (the province of Finnmarken in northern Norway). The visually inviting fells, which seem to recede endlessly towards the horizon, offer an impressive environment, yet I also chose this environment for its historical and active significance: the migration routes of the reindeer-herding Sámi have traversed these very fells for centuries. Given that it was impossible to return every archival image to its exact original location, these migration routes provided a symbol of homecoming. The locations I chose ranged from Karesuando in Sweden to the fells around Kirkenes in Norway. There is no absolute landscape. Landscape is always a screen on to which we project different fantasies and perspectives, including historical speculation. Thus landscape can also be likened to a theatre, or a stage. In one sense at least, photography and theatre are similar: both divide people into viewers and actors, reminding us of the divided nature of the world. Just as the curtain divides the audience from the actors, so the camera divides the photographer from the model, and the viewer from the person who is viewed.      This instrumentally created distinction between inside and outside lies at the heart of many of the problems of cultural studies, (documentary) photography and power, problems from which my work is by no means exempt.      The theatricality of Imaginary Homecoming is enhanced by the fact that every picture taken in the northern landscape only existed for the instant it took to construct the picture. After each shot, each act, the landscape always returned to its original condition. Taking a picture is like a ceremony or a ritual where the photographer struggles to reach beyond the landscape as it appears in its everyday guise. However, although Imaginary Homecoming excavates vanished cultural states, it also seeks to suggest a sort of historical 'counter-memory.' Indeed, this is the aim of Imaginary Homecoming: to offer an alternative way of looking at a landscape and the concomitant facts, which we may know already. In pondering the relation between past and present, instead of merely offering a new explanation for what we may have lost, the black-and-white photographs that make up Imaginary Homecoming try to suggest what we might, perhaps, still find.      Lapland has traditionally been depicted by historians as the melancholy Ultima Thule, the land of slumbering vistas, abandoned and unnamed: scenes only described by a succession of heroic explorers. As they travelled towards the midnight sun, the explorers felt compelled to sketch the indigenous people of Lapland. The resulting depictions were off-handed, generalising and ignorant. In the countries of Northern Europe, like elsewhere, photography became the colluding companion of scientic (geographical) expeditions, progressive colonisation and political rule. It is hardly a coincidence that chronologically, photography in Lapland expanded in tandem with 'the conquest of nature' in the area.      The northern landscape has changed since the first photographs were taken there. Imaginary Homecoming asks what has happened to the land itself over the past hundred years and more. The historical portraits in the series, as it were, block our path when we might be tempted simply to admire the beauty of the landscape. The eyes of the past, so to speak, scrutinise the immense changes that have befallen the northern landscape during this dying century.      The past is a figment of the imagination. This remains true regardless what documents we use to approach it. For the explorer of the past, old photographs serve as 'the vehicles of fantasy or dreaming,' just as maps once aided explorers. Even at best, photographs only serve to conjure up feelings and images. Instead of representing reality, they construct it. This book is called Imaginary Homecoming precisely because a real homecoming is impossible. The photographs only supply us with fragments of the past. To see the completed image, we need to use our imagination.      Translated by Philip Landon      From Imaginary Homecoming / Kuvitteellinen kotiinpaluu      (Pohjoinen, 1999) Top of page