• +

Street choreography

Jouko Leskelä, Esplanade, 1980, gelatin silver print. Donated for the Finnish Art Photography 1842–1986 exhibition in 1986.

For Jouko Leskelä (b. 1956), street photography means snapping pictures freely and staying alert while he is in the street. This picture was taken while the photographer was walking down the Esplanade in downtown Helsinki. The motion led to slight blurriness in the center of the image.

“Three women walking at the same pace in different directions. The great joy of traditional film is that you only notice the most thrilling snapshots once they have been developed. A dance-like moment, just one frame – a sliver of time so brief that it doesn’t have time to stick in your mind as an image, but is only discovered by surprise in the film. Did I take that?” - Jouko Leskelä, 2009

 

Skip "More on the subject" liftups

More on the subject

Life as a Street Urchin

Collection pick
Little Iris knew there were other kinds of men in the world than her father, Fritz Englund (1870–1950), an amateur photographer and a well-to-do bourgeois head of the family. She had seen them loitering on the streets, smoking cigarettes and hollering at women passing by.

From Zero to Sixty

Collection pick
“Showing movement means both man and camera have to be ready for action,” photographer, non-fiction author and researcher Vilho Setälä (1892–1985) writes in his book Valokuvaus tieteenä ja taiteena (Photography as Science and Art, 1940).

The Last Resort You Would Visit

Collection pick
Martin Parr's photos in The Last Resort series were taken in England’s traditional New Brighton beach resort.

The Museum's collections

Collections
The collections of the Finnish Museum of Photography include more than two million photographs. The collections focus on 20th-century Finnish photography, and are made up of both selected works by photographers and images from extensive photographic archives. The museum's collection of objects includes thousands of photography-related artefacts. The museum also has a paper archive and a photographic library.