L’étang qui se souvenait de tout 6, 2023
Pigment print
160 x 126 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.
Created during his residency in Giverny, the series 'L'étang qui se souvenait de tout' ('The Pond That Remembered All') reimagines Monet’s iconic gardens. Like Monet, he pursues the elusive qualities of light and shifting atmospheres. Using long exposures, he captures garden views reflected on a black-lacquered wooden panel, evoking the 18th-century Claude glass. These images blur the line between photography and painting, their distorted views suggesting scenes glimpsed through fogged windows. Reflecting the relationship between past and present, the photographs are multi-temporal, dreamlike reconstructions of memory and a bygone era.