Jorma Puranen

Viewing Room

Wednesday, 02 April 2025

Jorma Puranen

Icy Prospects #66, 2014
Pigment print
160 x 201 cm

Jorma Puranen is renowned for his works that explore the interplay between past and present. His practice spans ethnographic photography, historical portraiture, and landscape painting, often drawing inspiration from archives and museums. However, his approach to the archive is undisciplined - fragmentary rather than systematic. In Puranen’s work, the photograph becomes a space for reinterpreting a fluid past, where past and present converge. Reflection itself emerges as a central theme, and ultimately, Puranen seems to suggest that light is the only true reality to which the photograph has access.

In his Icy Prospects series, which began in 2005, Puranen creates dreamlike landscapes which draw from mythology, history, and the Arctic fascination with polar exploration. His images depict places which appear borderless, as if floating in time - a reminder of the immensity of the unknown which can be associated with life above the Arctic Circle. Using a painted, lacquered wooden board as a mirror, he photographs the reflections of the surrounding landscapes, producing ethereal images which capture the sublime quality of Nordic scenery.