VANISHING TALLINN

Photo project - Color 35mm

Working with the photographs of Tallinn has been an ongoing process through several phases and throughout several years. Early on I used to group the shots into thematic micro-cosmoses, then by visual associations, colors or composition. However the project never lift-off, while new shots were being added into the already existing archive.

Almost suddenly during the year 2021, the stock of color films became unavailable forcing me to work with black and white film rolls. This process lasted since I understood that black and white doesn't allow me to catch the chromatic light that naturally directs my attention when composing a shot.

As it had already happened in life, in order to comprehend a specific place with its current historical period, after living for an extensive period of time in close contact with its landscapes and its inhabitants, comes the phase of distancing from it.

In April 2023, while sitting at the kitchen table in a mountain village a few thousand kilometers from Tallinn, I realized that it's time to go through the archive and start a selection of photographs depicting the city between an arch of ten years. 2011 is the year when I frst set foot in the city, for good, 2021 is when I could shoot the last Kodak Color film.

Initially I wanted the project to be called Tallinna Postkaardid / Tallinn Postcards, and to be published as one of those touristic postcard boxes containing 10 or 20 photographs of different city views. Then, I matured the idea to give something back to this city, to its inhabitants and to its visitors, or to those that had a chance to spend a fragment of their life in its social, geographical and cultural context. So I decide to make a book which contains about 80 selected photographs, accompanied by a critical essay, a poetic text and the author's notes. This also hasn't yet got published, however the selection became an exhibition installed during the spring and autumn season in Sakala 3 foyer during VAT Teater performances of Haihtuv Tallinn / Vanishing Tallinn directed by Sander Põldsaar.

-

These photographs depicts ordinary places, maybe peripheral areas within the city, like those areas encountered while moving out of the car trajectories, while going home from work or from the shop, while creating a personal path in the urban space, between houses, among bunches of buildings, at the suburb's edges towards open spaces, through fenced areas.

In Tallinn there used to be a rule: whenever there is a fence, somewhere in the vicinity, there is also a way through it. I want to keep this rule as a metaphor of an ideal city.

Whatever the path is, its irrational magnetism always brings towards the sea, over those little suspended islands, giving to this city the feeling of being the last inhabited place at the edge of Europe, over which lies the unknown.
A sea smashed against a sky that seems too low, as if it would be almost possible to touch it, to dip into it.