22nd October – 15th November

Juha Tolonen (b. 1968, Australia) is an artist, lecturer, researcher, writer, photographer. He is an Adjunct Lecturer at Edith Cowan University in Australia and a Visiting Researcher at Aalto University in Helsinki, in the Department of Art. He currently lives and works in Lapland, Finland.

The Consolations of Photography is a new exhibition of photography and text as part of Juha’s’ artist residency in Finland. The new work will be drawn from a photography book currently in production titled ‘The Consolations of Photography’. The book is a reaction to the new vernacular photography that dominates the social media spaces of Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, etc. These sites are now the largest photography libraries on the planet. Global photographic output has grown exponentially in the past ten years, and with this growth the language of photography has quickened.

The Consolations of Photography intends to retrace some of the key moments in the development of photography to see if photography can still offer more than just instant communication. Recent discontent with the fast food age spurred a slow food revolution; perhaps there is a growing need for slow photography.

The images will be landscape photographs from northern Finland, shot on medium and large format film, during the autumn hunting season. The slow concentrated eye of this medium will focus on a landscape that is slowing down for the winter. The landscape is my ancestral homeland. My parents fled with many other emigrants in the post-war period, and now Finland is encouraging the children of emigrants to return. But, is return possible when the country no longer resembles the land of my forebears?