Markus Henttonen

Markus Henttonen´s photographs from ‘Twisted Tales – Road to Hope’ take us on a journey through landscape, time and emotions, his pictures a convergence of geographic space, beautiful portraits and atmospheric images. Suburban roads heading to nowhere in particular yet all paths we take towards some sort of hope, peace and equilibrium.

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There is a grand operatic sweep to this project with Henttonen giving us views of twinkling lights on the highway that cuts through the valley floor, the deer that live on the mountainside, the vast unconquered oceans, the city sprawl that runs into the endless horizon. The waiting, the needing, the wanting of humanity as it sits and hopes for better things to come. This poetic vision is manifest in these wonderfully muted images, the juxtaposition of beauty and melancholy, fear and hope, creating a tension, a desperation in every photograph, the thunderstorms that travel across his landscapes giving us a sense of doom, of wasted time, of our quixotic insistence on fighting against the reality of our existence in the hope of a better future.

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The stories he tells are tangential, fragments of a narrative we have to complete, the complexity of the collection leaving us with more questions than answers, each of us forced to fill in the gaps with our own visual metaphors in order to rationalise the randomness of these pictures that seem drawn from a dream yet firmly placed in a physical reality. This sense of the imaginary creates a strange aura, a deep unsettling that insists on pervading our consciousness and forcing us to elicit a truth that means something to us all. Here’s what Henttonen says about the series:

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”Twisted Tales is like life itself, a travel with joy and sadness of pleasure and despair combining the most personal with things common. Despite of the memories and flashbacks from the past and the unexpected turns this journey is going forward. It is like a puzzle that will never be complete. There will always be something slightly out of place, a little bit twisted.”

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These photographs are only a small part of this magnificent series. Please check out the rest of his pictures from the projec, they are truly wonderful.

 

TEXT BY MORAY MAIR