Jury’s motivation:
Nina Korhonen works persistently according to her own compass, with timeless and deeply personal imagery. She depicts human life masterfully, whether she stays at home or travels far away to foreign continents. She takes photography very seriously – but at the same time the images often show glimpses of her humor.
Nina Korhonen (b. 1961 in Tampere, Finland) is active in Stockholm. Ever since her education at the Nordic School of Photography (1987–90), she has made a name for herself for her highly personal photography, where family, friends and places are subjects through which she examines identity and relationships with warmth and an eye for the comic.
The exhibition features images from three of Korhonen’s series – each also published as a photo book. This is the first time they have been shown together, under the title Trilogy. Together, these series form a coherent story that spans decades and continents – a kind of frieze above all of the women in the artist’s life.
The oldest series, Minne. Muisto. Memory., consists of black-and-white photographs taken in Finland between 1987 and 1995. Here, the child’s gaze encounters the seriousness of adult life, in fragments characterized by the lingering on details and moments that characterize the function of memory.
Anna Amerikan mummu from 1993–99 is perhaps Korhonen’s most notable project. Here she follows her grandmother through her everyday life in the United States. When Anna was laid off from her job at the textile factory in Tampere in the 1950s, she took a bold step into the unknown to follow her dreams. With only rudimentary knowledge of English, she moved to America and took a job as a cook. For the rest of her life, she divided her time between Finland, New York and Florida. In the photographs, a subtle humor plays against the grandeur of independently shaping her own life.
Anna, me and mom, Lake Worth, Florida. Rewind the photos
