Whether portraying immigrant Mexican communities in San Antonio, examining life following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, or spending time with bachelors in his home country, Finnish photographer Esko Männikkö does not consider his work as documentary. Instead his painterly images capture something ephemeral but empathetic about his subjects, tacitly asking questions about society, place and people without necessarily giving answers. “The questions are more important than the answers,” he told the academic Maija Koskinen.
A selection of his photographs are currently on display as part of Galerie Nordenhake’s 50th anniversary exhibitions, happening simultaneously in Berlin, Stockholm and Mexico City, including Männikkö’s striking collaborative series with fellow Finnish photographer Pekka Turunen. Taken between 1989 and 1995, Pemoht (a play on the Russian word meaning “reparation”) captures the everyday lives of people on the Kola peninsula, a remote but heavily militarised area in Russia near the Finnish border.
Though Männikkö’s work often gives face and beauty to the disenfranchised, he has been reticent to label his work as such. “Sometimes, I think I am a bit political, but not in the sense that my pictures have a message stuck on to them,” he told Koskinen. “I am a maker of pictures and the politics comes in alongside that. I don’t go round shouting about some ideology, and nor do I feel any need to say what my pictures are. [...] Photographs always record things from life as it is lived, but they are still not absolute truths about anything.”
Photographs by Esko Männikkö & Pekka Turunen , Carl Henrik Tillberg/Galerie Nordenhake Stockholm, Berlin, Mexico City,
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