Colecciones de arte

Trajectory

Pudasjärvi (Finland), 1959

The scarce presence of Nordic artists in the habitual channels of contemporary art make Männikkö an exception in the current sphere of photography. He studied and has carried out his artistic activities in different Finnish cities, although his humble origins -he is from a poor fishing village- is a constant in his work. The majority of his images are portraits of the inhabitants of the forests of Lapland and the plains of Ostrobothnia, in Northern Finland. This is a region in decline, whose inhabitants have left for the city in droves. Those who have remained are mostly single men, hunters, fishermen and many unemployed. This is one of the reasons women are rarely portrayed in his photographs.

Männikkö's work unfolds between anthropological and social documentary and purely aesthetic creation, his work method also falling between these two aspects. The artist lives with his models for days, speaking with them, drinking with them and entering their houses as a guest, as a witness who is not a bothersome stranger but someone who can get close enough to create this work. But Männikkö's perspective also stems from a very specific frame of mind and aesthetic sense: all the people portrayed are inside their homes (only rarely do they appear outdoors), in everyday attitudes and surrounded by the customary objects of their environment. All this results in imagery that is more premeditated than it would be if it were the simple social documentation of the decadence of a region of the country.

Each image as a whole offers us a great deal of information about the people portrayed, about the specific social group and geographical and historical sector they belong to and about their tastes and habits. From 1996 to 1998, Männikkö was invited to work in the United States but this did not alter his work method. There, he chose to work with disenfranchised populations such as that of Batesville, an American region largely populated by Mexican emigrants whom he portrayed with the same humaneness and distance that makes him an objective spectator.

An important aspect of his work is the actual presentation of each photograph, always in colour and always in formats that are very different from those of his German counterparts, to whom, on the other hand, he is so close with regard to his objectivity and social analysis. The artist frames each photograph himself, with painted frames bought at the very street markets and flea markets where the people photographed buy and sell their belongings. The combination of the modern photographic images and those restored old-fashioned frames give rise to an object that goes beyond the photographic image itself, conferring on the work a value as object and completing the aesthetic information about the protagonists they depict. R. O.