Wet-Plates
by
Kati Leinonen

My wet-plate collodion work got into the finalists of Finlands most prestigious photographic competition Fotofinlandia 2011. Check out the work at  http://www.fotofinlandia.fi/ehdokkaat/

Review on newspaper Kaleva about Lifes -exhibition.

June’s exhibition pieces are finally finished and planning of the exhibition hanging well in process. Here is a little peek.

Finnish Taide&Design (Art&Design) magazine published a fine article on my wet-plate artwork in there December 2010 issue.

Liite 6 Taide & Design

Here is a link to the web exhibition of all the competing images that were also in an exhibition in Sanomatalo in Helsinki in December 2010.

http://www.mainosvalokuvaajat.com/nayttely/smv2010/slides/B_Leinonen_Kati_Untitled_1.html

I have an exhibition coming up in Northern Photographic Centre’s Kummigallery in Oulu. Lifes exhibition concists of triptychs of portraits of old age. Aging and limitation of life are the central themes in my work today.

The exhibition will be open from 6th November till 12th of December.

I am currently working on a series of photographs on old age. In our society youth is idealized and no room is given for aging. It is the young and the beautiful that are represented in the images around us. I have chosen to photograph people over 80 years of age, who I find fascinating with all of their knowledge and life experiences. They also seem fragile and bare expecting the evident that we all are to face oneday. Here are the latest wet-plates of my grandmother who is 86-years old. I photographed her in my greenhouse where the sun was filtered through the roof to get very even light.

The Exhibition opening on Tuesday was a success. There were so much more people than I dared to hope for. I had a great night, thanks to all of you people that were there. Here is a view snapshots from the opening night.

I have lately been working on first solo exhibition. The exhibition is divided in two parts. The first part contains colorful digital images from my home town Oulu and from my travels to Paris, New York etc. They are dreamy images of cityscapes taken at dawn. The second part of the exhibition consists of my wet-plate portraits of real and fictive characters. The experience of photographing and being photographed changes radically when using the old process. And because of that I am able to get closer to my subjects and reveal something real from beneath the surface. I don’t know quite how to put it in words.

Here is the poster for my exhibition.