BY WILLIAM PYM
Pictures Can Get Results Elina Brotherus is a Finnish photographer who has been exhibiting since 1997, in Europe as well as in institutions around the world. She shoots in a range of analogue and digital formats. She is held in particularly high regard in France, where she is partially based, as well as in her native Helsinki. She has maintained an impressively high work rate and boasts rare stamina as an artist. She is, I’ll argue, an artist with an important lesson to share. From one point of view, Brotherus is a formalist of the highest order. Photography is a mechanical medium— it is a matter of fitting a composition in the frame and letting in a measured amount of light so that the lens sees what you want it to see. Precision is a prerequisite for this medium; there are rules and limits if you intend to construct an image and not just a blurry, nonsensical mess. You literally can’t make a photographic image unless you accept these rules and limits. Born of this mechanical logic, a photographer with a formal instinct employs a natural, precise method. Brotherus builds a world from what’s inside the frame. She figures out what’s possible through this method of capturing the world. Her 2018 series La Samaritaine, for example, is an extended formal riff and exercise in image construction. The series was shot in a Parisian Art Nouveau department store, which at that time was in limbo while the luxury conglomerate LVMH was awaiting permission to complete an ambitious renovation. Over the course of a week-long shoot, Brotherus photographed herself in countless contexts around the empty, crumbly edifice. She measured the space between curved iron boning, pointing her arms wide, becoming as big as she could be, attempting to meet the architecture on its own terms while also making a joke of it (such as in the title of the work L’Homme de Vitruve, a reference Leonardo da Vinci). She shot herself from behind on the edge of the roof, in the middle of the frame, staring in the four different directions available to her and, by extension,
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