Pekka Potka

Fotofinlandia is THE premier photo contest in Finland. Previous competition was in 2008. Fotofinlandia 2011 was started in 2010 and continued in 2011 with preliminary juryings among Finnish photography organizations. These organizatons are members of Finnfoto and in total three are some 8000 photographers who are entitled to participate. 33 series made it into semi-finals to compete for a place in Finalist exhibition. Fotofinlandia is for series, not for single photographs. Two of those 33 were mine. This series, Cold:Snow - Moon:Light, was elected into Finalist exhibition. Earlier it won gold in ”Landscape and Nature” at the yearly exhibition of Finnish Advertising Photographers´ Association in 2010. My work on this series started in January in 2010 when there was full Moon. The Moon was also closer to the Earth than usually. Southern Finland had more snow than there had been for many years. All this inspired me to go out, wade through snow and do a series of moody night time images. I shot these images using Olympus E-P2 camera with Zuiko 50mm f/2.0 lens. All images were shot at ISO 1600 with lens wide open. I converted images into toned B&W look, added some glow and adjusted contrast.

From 2005 on I have explored the area on the border between photography and graphics. I have broken apart continuous tone and ”photographic line” which are at the heart of photography. I´m also working less in three dimensions as before. Sacrificing tones leads into a emphasis on vivid structures on surfaces. Of course they can be better seen in large prints. This selection is based on my exhibition in 2008.

I started my career in advertising photography in 1984. By 2004 I decided to phase out doing commercial photography and give more time to developing Potkastudios because the company had grown too big for me to be good as a photographer and at the same time lead the studio. Already during spring 2003 I had a retrospective exhibition. This gallery is based on that exhibition but includes also a couple later works. Images are in chronological order and caption tells client and year. Potkastudios closed down in 2010 as I wanted to exercise my own photography.

After the exhibition of Aberration group I concentrated in shooting in color. This work came into a conclusion in my exhibition and photographic book in 1992. They both were under the name of Bel Aire. This name comes from the image that was raised as book´s title image. I had been shooting in the same style in Finland and abroad. For the sake of coherent style, the book and exhibition contains only images shot in the USA. Text by Jukka Mallinen gives an agreeable view into images, even though my motives were different. I owe Tuomo-Juhani Vuorenmaa from Musta Taide publishing a lot for Bel Aire ever being published. He and graphic designer Jorma Hinkka were the dynamos behind the book. This gallery contains the book as scanned pages (with a little crop to make images larger).

Exhibition by Aberraatio (Aberration) group was my second real exhibition after a collection sponsored by Polaroid. Aberration group was formed by five, then young, hobbyists in Helsinki Camera Club. We wanted to break old conventions and created some confusion and ruckus. But really we focused in developing our talent at our meetings, discussing images and meeting visitors. A natural climax and finishing point was group exhibition. This gallery is my part of exhibition. It was also a turning point for me, color photography surpassed BW from then on.