The Night Shift Photographer

Janne Lehtinen from Finland spent a year wandering by night with his camera through his hometown of Kotka, searching for its soul - and documented how globalisation is changing industrial cities.

Sunila, built in the 1930’s by star architect Alvar Aalto, was once considered the world’s most beautiful industrial complex. It was a symbol of prosperity and growth in a happy new world. But those times are long gone. Janne Lehtinen, whose photographs are sought by collectors all over the world, has made portraits of his hometown and his father, himself a shift worker at this very paper factory. The photographs have now been published as the last part of an autobiographical trilogy of books. In Berlin, the Taik Gallery is also showing other works by this artist.

Your father must be very patient. Did he like to sit in front of your camera after a hard night shift? He rather looks like having the desire to go to bed...

Sure, he was tired after the long night at the Factory, and after cycling several kilometers back from work. The images were taken pretty quickly after he arrived. I had built my studio set in his messy garage, and each morning I took just one roll of film. He only had to sit down for a while, did not need to pose or smile, just look as tired as he was. And I sensed it was often kind of a lonely situation to arrive back home after the night shift, so maybe the fact that there was something unusual going on just gave him a little extra patience.

For the period of one year you documented your city during the night until early morning. What was your idea?

The series was based on a method where I went to photogpraph the town those nights when my father had a night shift in the factory. Those were four nights in a row, at least once a month. At six o´clock in the morning I took a portrait of my father after the night shift. I wanted to create a closed series which followed a certain method by predeciding the place and the time when to take the photographs. I had a clear calendar when to go, just like a worker in the factory. This way I had to work with ”limited tools” so the element of coincidense started to play a big role in the shooting process. Finally the method of doing this series became as important as the photographs themselves, sometimes even more important.

What have you been looking for?

I wanted to tell something about this ordinary, quiet town. The town was built around paper industry and it used to have very strong ties to working class culture. During the globalisation and the global economy these ties have faded bit by bit, and we can see the results of this process in the environment as well as in general atmosphere of the population. People are confused, uncertain about their future, forced to look for new directions. This kind of development has been a global phenomena almost for the last two decades in the Western countries. In this photographic work I searched for scenes that could reflect these parts of reality, locally but why not also globally. Then there were personal motives to start the series. In my earlier works I´ve worked on autobiographical themes like searching for bonds between generations and reflections from the childhood. Here I continued to work around the same themes.

And what did you find wandering around during the night?

Visually the journey was most of the time very challenging. In fact I´m not living in this place anymore, but as it was the town where I grew up in I already knew most of the places and I did not expect the city to give me any big surprises. So my humble goal for every shooting night was to find just one interesting scene, somehow accidentally unsual spot or view. Probably I found some of those, but in fact it was occasionally very strong experience to drive/walk around the completely empty town where almost every corner has a meaning (to me) but at the same time you understand that this place is ”in the end of the world” and there is no ”bigger” meaning at all. You get this feeling that if anything ever happened here it happened long time ago. It´s pretty melancholic feeling and gives you a clear sense of limited scope.

How should someone who doesn`t know Kotka imagine this place?

Once I drove around the town with my french collegue and friend, and he said the town reminds him of a song by The Pogues: ”Dirty Old Town”. That´s probably close to the truth.

Kotka - Karhula is the part of the town where all the picutures were taken - is a small town in the South cost of Finland. It can be determined by three major things - paper industry, sea and the location close to Russian border. Through these elements the city has bit rough outfit. I would say you´ll find these small industrial towns in any parts of Europe - a bit sad and melancholic places with foggy air and bad smell coming out from the factory. However Karhula has something extra to offer: The Sunila factory area is designed by famous finnish architect Alvar Aalto and that gives the place a special atmosphere, especially now when the ”glory days” are over in the area, and the buildings have this forgotten feeling, even thought there are people living in them.

In this photographical series you see industrie and civilisation invading into nature. Does this play a role for the people living there?

Not particularily I think. This is a bit sad but true. Industrie gives people a reason to live in these areas, so the population have probably learnt to put things in such order that earning their living comes first, nature and other things only after that. This way of thinking is not good when looking at it from the natures perspective. In my photographic work I am generally interested in this kind of nature views in the city landscape. Nature damaged or touched by civilization. How to deal with the nature is a very crusial question for us at the moment. But it is also about human beings leaving traces and marks in the nature, layers from different periods and individual destinies.

Which other artists or photographers are important for you and your work?

Larry Sultan's ”Pictures from Home”, Richard Long, Andrei Tarkovsky, David Lynch, Ingmar Bergman.

Do you already have new projects?

Yes, I´ve been working in Russia and the Baltic countries during the last couple of years. The work is about fear and control and it has echoes from the Soviet Union and it´s strong influenses towards the neighborhood countries, including Finland. But I´m doing the work through personal stories coming from my family history.

Janne Lehtinen, „Night Shift“, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2009

Interview conducted by Anna Wander, SeenBy.com


Copyright for images: © Janne Lehtinen