The photographic work Dorian combines a child’s play on colouring images and an image of my father taken for school. My father died very young, when I was just a baby. As a child I used to imagine him via the few photos that I had of him.
In the famous Oscar Wilde novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, a young man sells his soul to ensure that a painted picture of him will grow older in time rather than his own appearance. In the image of my father I saw the opposite: a picture of a person captured in his youth, never to get to grow old.
The impossibility of remembering one’s parents as children is surpassed by the sense of recognition. These are the grounds from which this image emerged.
Dorian was exhibited at
- solo exhibition Samaan Aikaan (At the same time), B-galleria, Turku, August 2009.
