MIKKO ITÄLAHTI's photostream  

About me

I am interested in the "classic" themes of humanistic and critical human geography. My focus is, among other themes, on the aesthetics and senses of places, milieus and landscapes, on the existential paradox of human dwelling in the world, on the perceptional dimensions of time-space and so on. But Instead of scientific text for scientific audiences, my main communication media is photography adressed for more varied public.

I stand with Aby Warburg's renaissancist notion on (the ultimate) human knowledge being a process analoguous to browsing through a great library, offering fluid and multidirectional associations between the different fields of science, painting, popular culture etc. Photography is perhaps the most suitable platform for communication and reproduction of this kind of geographical knowledge, rooted in the human life-world experiences and working for the fruitful re-enchantment of our life-world.

I hope, if only for my tiny part, to be an agent in the cultural change where true human needs are set before the technocratic economy's needs, and where the the cultural priority is set on the nurture of human life-world and its aesthetic and ecological conditions.

Few years ago I invented what I call The geonostalgic action theory . This is an attempt to analyze and – to a certain degree – validate the landscape-evoked nostalgic longing, the bittersweet wondering about "how beautiful the world was". According to my theory, this should not be dismissed as plain silly conservativism, but instead it could be appreciated as a completely valid concern about the ongoing degradation of both human agency "the human foothold" as well as the ecological diversity, under the expansion of economist-technocratic world system guided by the hunger for steadily increasing material output.

Maybe I must stress that my theory only concerns about our –humanity's– troubled relation to our common earth. It is an "outsider" perspective that has more to do with the material imprint of the western culture rather than with the "content" of culture itself. Geonostalgia is not about the delusion that things generally were better before, nor do I share anything with the fearful and unintelligent right-wing conservativism and its dangerous nationalist / tribal emotions, nor do I long for the "simpler good old days", nor for the values of the past... Instead, geonostalgia is about using my humble voice for a progressive cultural change towards a new kind of respectful relationship to nature, based on critical romanticism and sustainable aesthetics.

Recently I have been collaborating with Anna Vuolanto for "The zones of slowness" project. For two years now (in October 2011), we have been photographing for artifacts, cultural practices, milieus, places and landscapes, that still exist in time-space, but that also have a strong sense of tranciency to them. The project has offered us insights into the pace of natural vs. technological change, and into the geography of tranciency – the time is not the same everywhere!

Central to our approach is the understanding that the process itself is an inseparable part of the outcome - that's why the "principle of slowness" goes through our whole activity. It includes sustainable and (relatively) slow forms of traveling; walking, bicycling, skiing, and trains and sometimes buses for the longer expeditions. The use of analogue and manual cameras and the limitations imposed by old technology is also considered as a creative asset.

My Flickr profile will include some "blueprints" of this work in the digital form. The original analogical stuff will be exhibited at Laterna Magica gallery (Helsinki) in 12.April- 5.May 2012, as a part of the Helsinki Photography Biennial's programme.