From the Series Possibility of Constancy

My interest towards photography is closely related to the possibility of being able to stop something in time, to be able to make something stand still. That something has existed, and has now been set in a motionless state. There is a certain aspect of lost moments, a presence of sadness and a feeling of letting go when looking at photographs. They exist at the impossible intersection of the momentary and the constant, between the fleeting feeling of being alive and consciousness of the moments passing by.

In my pictures, attempts in recognising and lighting of obscure and vague movements, are made visible. Symbolic meanings are essential in my way of working. I am interested in how the concrete surface of reality and photographs relate to metaphorical things that can be found underneath. How intuitive interpretation, silent information relates to that which is portrayed in the concrete surface of the photograph. What fills the room behind the picture, allows one to step closer. Objects and spaces can occur to be like transparent routes between the inside and the outside, between the seen surface and unconscious atmospheres, meanings.

I want to approach the momentariness of living through constancy. The paradox is that when you try to conserve or protect a moment by stopping it, you inevitably lose it at the same time. I reach for the kind of experience where balance and its fragility, delicacy, are present. Thoughts of incompleteness and insecurity are important to my pictures. I try to trace those kinds of occasions of seeing when words dissolve and scatter apart, objects and incidents intensify into symbolic language, the silence of interaction. How to stop a feeling, a memory? By binding it to visible things, attaching it to a room's walls, the surface of photographs. Like translucent skin with unforeseen memories beneath.

Anni Leppälä