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)
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