arts and design

The big picture: a special branch in Finland

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Ville Lenkkeri took this photograph in 2013. The great birch tree, which stood behind his family’s summerhouse in Finland, had been a fixture in his life since childhood. When he was away from the house, he had a sense that it would watch over the place in his absence. And when he saw it once again he was reminded of some “magical and eternal strength”. The photo was taken on the day that Lenkkeri had to chop the tree down.

He had noticed that it had started to wither and rot from within two years earlier, but had resisted admitting that “its eternity was about to come to an end”. That summer, however, he decided that “felling the giant was a more honourable way to let it go”.

Lenkkeri is part of a group of art photographers known as the Helsinki School, who have used landscape images to reflect a psychology of place. In this case, he wanted to capture his feelings as he approached the tree, chainsaw in hand. He fetched two suits from the house, one for a funeral and another for a party, representing ending and renewal. His two brothers each put a suit on and climbed up a ladder to sit on the branch “acting me and the two poles of my sensations”. Lenkkeri sees the picture as a sort of self-portrait.

He cried when he felled the tree. But then he set about cutting up its trunk and branches to make the frames for his broadly autobiographical series of photographs, Petrified Forest, several of which are now included in a collection of work by the Helsinki School. In his image and in his memory and in the wood of the frames, he insists, “the birch tree lives on”.

The Helsinki School: The Nature of Being Vol 6, edited by Timothy Persons and Asia Zak Persons, is published by Hatje Cantz (£37)

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