Pentti Sammallahti, a Photographer at Peace with the World

On a rocky island, one day, Pentti Sammallahti lived through a photographic epiphany. “Finding myself on a rocky island, it suddenly dawned on me that the earth was not round, and I decided not to move,” this gentle master of restraint would later recall. “I suddenly grasped what the stone beside me, the boat on the shore, the cloud sailing across the sky, and the dotted trail of migrating birds were telling me… I then understood that photographs are not taken; they are received.”

The panoramic format asserted itself early on. From Helsinki, he set off to roam Europe and the Soviet Union in search of these suspended moments. Writer Gérard Macé, whose preface accompanies the paperback reissue of his work by Actes Sud, sees in it “a universe of fables.” Not that the scenes he captures illustrate those of Aesop or La Fontaine, but anyone who has read those animal tales will find an echo of them in these images. A dog enthroned on a snowmobile takes on the air of a sovereign savoring a newfound power. Bird portraits, for their part, pay tribute above all to the intelligence of corvids.

Pentti Sammallahti, Seoul, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

What strikes one, though, Macé writes, is “their mystery and their dignity, their life and their personality in full,” free of any moral. Every animal here leads “a life like our own, and yet parallel.” A griffon vulture of princely bearing walks alone through an Alpine landscape. The same presence inhabits a Nepalese monkey, caught in profile beneath a sheltering tree, in a posture somewhere between scribe and sphinx. It brings the essayist back to a line of La Fontaine that might have been written for it: “So a creature may think, and yet not know itself.” A quiet humor is never far away, in the fabulist as in the photographer.

This attentiveness to the mystery of life runs all the way into the photographer’s technique. His images breathe patience, unhurried time, and a deep complicity with nature. The very paper of the prints, the essayist notes, echoes the shades of snow, “melting and crystalline, warm and cold at once.” The Finnish winter stamps dark silhouettes onto the immaculate landscape with a sharpness recalling the paintings of Bruegel, except that the solitude, in Sammallahti’s work, feels greater still. Summer reverses the nature of these contrasts: two white horses appear on the black sand of the Outer Hebrides, beneath an oversized cloud.

This same reversal governs the image gracing the cover of the new edition of the book devoted to him: pink flamingos, captured in Namibia, reveal their brilliant pallor above dark water and reeds that are almost black. In Seoul, a bird crosses a milky sky where a veiled moon hangs among pine branches. Beneath a sun that is, once again, veiled, a toad meets the photographer’s lens. Gérard Macé imagines that it is the very same frog whose leap the Japanese poet Bashō immortalized centuries earlier, in his most celebrated haiku, returned today to meet the gaze of “a poet turned photographer.”

The parallel feels all the more fitting given how readily his eye evokes a Japanese aesthetic: in its quietness, certainly, in its beauty, but also in the profound spiritual dimension one senses beneath his images. A delicious suspension of time, to be savored like a restorative pause at the very heart of Arles, before returning home to lose oneself once more in his complete body of work.

Exhibition: “Pentti Sammallahti”, at Les Rencontres d’Arles, Espace Croisière (Association du Méjan). Curated by Pentti Sammallahti and Géraldine Lay.

Book: Pentti Sammallahti, preface by Gérard Macé, reissued in the Photo Poche collection by Actes Sud. 144 pages. €14.50.