Renja Nurmi

Modern Faith

Renja Nurmi (FI)

“Jos mä en olis 100%:n varma tästä, niin mä en ikinä tekis näin (If I weren’t 100% certain about all of this, I would never do something like this).”

Modern Faith is a photo reportage about the modern Christian faith. In her series of photographs, Renja Nurmi has documented how faith, trust and caring are visible in a modern Christian church. The mainstream Finnish Evangelical Lutheran church doesn’t often attract youth or people under the age of forty, but small and quite new independent churches, like the one that can be seen in Renja’s series, attract them more. At the Sunday gathering of Northwind Church, most of the people are in their twenties and thirties, they sing modern gospel songs, dance, worship with hands raised and the atmosphere is very different from the traditional Finnish churches.

Various artworks of the artist were exhibited at the National Museum of Finland and JCDecaux Finland.

© Renja Nurmi, Faith & trust III, 2020

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Renja Nurmi is a photographer and graphic designer working mainly in the field of journalism. Her series Modern Faith was created as part of a photo reportage course that Renja took during her Visual Journalism studies at Tampere University. Religions, spirituality and the emotional togetherness in religious communities have always fascinated her, and the artist feels that the spiritual side of people’s lives in this modern world isn’t represented and talked about enough.

© Renja Nurmi, Faith & trust IV, 2020