2022 – 2024

I have photographed moments that reveal a symmetry of feeling across generations, and show how human relationships begin and endure throughout life. The series brings together portraits of friends from their youth, now in their seventies, alongside young people whose fragile shared moments are shaping who they are and who they will become.

In this project, Jari Silomäki captures moments that visualise the symmetry of human feelings, either directly or symbolically. These include portraits of childhood friends, now over seventy years old, as well as scenes with young people whose shared, fragile experiences contribute to the formation of their identities.

The project began in the light of recent notorious geopolitical events, which deepened my interest in how people sustain long-lasting relationships amid larger, often hostile historical forces. The war also affects the way we consume art, and photography in particular, a medium in which the human gaze lies at its very core.

In the portraits of childhood friends, people look into each other’s eyes across decades of shared life. As a photographer, Silomäki looks at them in turn. The gaze of a lifelong friend is deep and multifaceted: it becomes a means through which experiences and emotions are understood and communicated, while also evoking the passage of time, change, respect, and love.

In the scenes with young people, cityscapes are bathed in warm light. Here, feelings of togetherness and belonging are palpable. Shared experiences are essential to our understanding of the world; they emerge when individuals are capable of deep empathy towards one another. These warm urban scenes attempt to bear witness to such moments and share a similar emotional terrain with the portraits of older friends. For example, the image Silent Teenagers is juxtaposed with an image in which ripe, soft plums rest on cold, hard tarmac. Together, they evoke a narrative of time and fragility, laden with memory.

Julianna, Julianna and Julianna
2021

Unknown Pilots Above the Downtown
(Reconstructed)
2022

The Climbing Tree of Childhood
(Heikki and Raimo)

2023

Walking with a Friend 2
(Armands and Mateja)
2023

Silent Teenagers
(Reconstruction)
2023

Plums on Tarmac
2023

Walking with a Friend
(Reconstructed)
2023

 A Shared Dream
(Exanity -band)
2023

A Class Reunion at a Theatre Foyer
2023

A Dense Moment at the Bridge to the Silk Factory
(Reconstructed)
2022

Helju and Luulaja
2022 

Harebells
2023 

Memorial Pyre
(Outi, Irma and Satu)
2023

 A Flooding River
2023

Armas and Perttu
2024

2001 – ongoing

For the past twenty-five years, I have taken a single photograph each day, marking its surface with a personal or world-political event that occurred on that very day.

Silomäki followed a set of personally developed rules when photographing My Weather Diaries: one photograph per day, no tripods, no lighting tricks, and no conscious arrangement. The image has to come about alongside the rest of daily life, as mechanically as possible. The aim is to refrain from conscious content creation and to allow the meaning of the images to develop freely over time. Any significance lies in the image’s relationship with time — if it is to manifest at all. The photographs are accompanied by writings on subjects ranging from contemporary global news to intimate inner experiences. As the news cycle and Silomäki’s personal life intertwine, geographical distances lose their meaning. When the project began, the weather was not a politically charged issue. Today, every atmospheric change is perceived through the lens of the climate crisis.

Teaser

The archipelago of Pori, I am in love. Today there is an environmental

conference in Bonn: The Kyoto Protocol is ready to be ratified.

Finlandia Hall, three hours after the collapse of the World Trade Center.

Helsinki, the day that six million people around the world were demonstrating against Iraqi War.

Hamburg. Ariel Sharon was ready to relinquish some colonies for the sake of peace

Anu breastfeeding at the Pére Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Little green men appear in the Crimea peninsula in Ukraine: soldiers without national identification.

Malmi. I am in the park with Anu and Leinu. It is the Arab Spring.

The hashtag # MeToo is spreading on social media.

Girls are playing on the Ruutinkoski Beach.
At the same time, a new kind of virus is spreading in China.

Russia began an all-out military offensive on Ukraine at 5:00 am by air, land and sea. The age of peace in Europe is over.

I returned to Helsinki from the cottage after the news blackout. Three days earlier, Hamas had launched a massive attack on Israel, firing thousands of rockets and sending fighters across the border. In response, Israel had launched extensive airstrikes in Gaza. I look up from my phone screen and stare out the window for a moment.

Selected works 2001 – 2025

2017 – 2020

I convey the stories of individuals who have moved across social classes, from perspectives of their own choosing.

Rapid and large-scale wealth accumulation is a twenty-first-century phenomenon in many parts of the developing world. Jari Silomäki observes that people who have experienced upward class mobility have been underrepresented in documentary art. As a result, such individuals are often portrayed in popular culture in reductive ways, frequently framed through narratives of capitalism and the worship of money. Inspired by the story of Anita, Silomäki began to engage with the experiences of upwardly mobile individuals from seven different countries.

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Installation view at the Finnish Museum of Photography

2009 – 2020

I reconstruct the narratives of anonymous individuals from online discussion forums, using actors as my medium.

In Atlas of Emotions, Jari Silomäki investigates turning points in the lives of people who write on internet discussion forums from behind alter-ego screen names. He delved deeply into online archives, spending hundreds of hours searching for the writings of anonymous individuals from around the world.

Silomäki seeks to identify a central thread in each writer’s life and to reproduce the emotions and events described in the original posts as accurately as possible. He edited the forum texts into a manuscript and staged the authors’ homes in his studio, drawing on clues found within the writings themselves. Actors then interpreted these reimagined scenes.

The texts that appear on the surface of the work are extracts from the lives of anonymous individuals, presented in their native languages. Silomäki has blurred, altered, and edited certain details in order to protect the writers’ identities. The work moves the viewer from the general to the specific and intimate — towards people’s fears, desires, and dreams. Central to Silomäki’s practice is an effort to expand the notion of documentary and to record, on a global scale, the events and emotions of our time.

Making of

Selected pseudonym 2009 – 2020

Pseudonym Rose

Pseudonym Armeijakaveri

“ My army buddy is a masculine man, tall and handsome, full of attraction. I have seen women show interest before he said a word. When the man starts a conversation, the woman is sold right away. And not just any woman, but a smart and beautiful older woman. When my army buddy has sex, it’s not an experiment. He hasn’t taken anyone’s virginity and he never cheated on his partner. 

In the army, he took care of the others, including me. He told clever stories. He’s smart, but not in the way people with a university education are smart. My army buddy knows the practical stuff; he can make and repair all sorts of things. He has leadership qualities, reasoning, and problem-solving abilities. I’ve never met anyone like him before. 

With my army buddy, what matters is what I want to be. Other people’s attitudes depend on how we appear in their eyes. Theo Fleury, the best man ever to play for the Calgary Flames, has ruined two marriages, his finances, and his health. Ice hockey is the only thing he has. And he doesn’t really have that anymore. Theo has won the Stanley Cup, led the player statistics, and broken NHL records. He’s a beloved player that I will appreciate forever.”

Pseudonym Miinasofia2

“ I fell off a horse and was too afraid to get back up on it. I rode a bike back home and closed myself in my room. Pink’s ‘Please Don’t Leave Me’ was playing on the radio.” 

Pseudonym Agnieszka85

“ I was seventeen years old, blinded by love, and pregnant. Half a year later, Cibor offered me his mother’s ring while walking in the street. He was seven years older than I was. My parents held a modest reception for the relatives. All was well, until my newly wedded husband said he wouldn’t be staying for the night. He was going home to his mother. 

I lived with my parents, but my husband was with me when I went to give birth. The midwife praised him: ‘He held the baby so gently, and he cried.’ As we came back from the hospital, I found out our new address. The baby would sleep with Cibor’s mother and aunt, in their room. I would move into the extended kitchen with my husband. 

When Martha got sick, I couldn’t go to her. My mother-in-law was tired, but still wanted to care for the child alone. If I tried to go for a walk with my daughter, my mother-in-law announced that she would take the child out. I could take care of my own business. I said no. They called me ungrateful. 

I was an idle burden, an extra mouth to feed. The door to my child was locked in front of my eyes. I applied for jobs; I attended courses. I met people who taught me to be selfish. And that was how I acted, to get out of that sick house.” 

Pseudonym Villes

“ So, I got an annual membership at a gym. Immediately I got hooked on the clunking of the free weights, the energetic background music, and those moments when I repeated the movements like a machine. A cold shower, clean clothes, and a recovery drink afterward became my greatest pleasures. On the way back home, it made my day when my legs buckled on the stairs. This is how I lost my faith. I was the last of my siblings to believe in Jesus until adulthood.” 

Pseudonym Angervo

“ Yesterday was my youngest cat’s birthday and all its friends were able to come. In the evening I watched a recording of the royal wedding of Princess Victoria and Daniel. I had a dream about painting, kissing, and falling in love.” 

Pseudonym Inkoo84

“ It was a clear summer night in 1984.
I felt a presence in my room. A sweater fell off the edge of the closet. I said the Our Father prayer. I clicked the night light on. In the morning, my mom asked if the sound at night woke me up.” 

Pseudonym 来小姐

“ He asked me: ‘What are you feeling now?’ I told him I didn’t feel anything. He said he looked down upon me. I said that was his business. 

It was raining outside. I walked into a little restaurant that serves breakfast and chatted with the owner. She asked me something private, like what my husband does for a living, how much money my husband gives me every month, and so on. Honestly, I didn’t like these questions, but I answered them all patiently. I was haunted by loneliness.” 

Installation view at the Finnish Museum of Photography 2020

Interview with Andrey Shabanov and Jari Silomäki

Andrey Shabanov: In contrast to the more descriptive method of your internationally recognized project My Weather Diary(2001–ongoing), Atlas of Emotions(2020) seems to advocate a novel, “performative” approach to reality. How do you place this project within your art practice? 

Jari Silomäki: In Atlas of Emotions, I combine documentary and fictitious elements, as I have done for many years in my art projects. I describe this method as “narrative documentarism.” It assumes the union of text and image, narrative continuity, and extends the concept of a document. Some roots of my method can be traced back to John Grierson (1898–1972), who famously defined a documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality.” The earliest example of narrative documentarism in my practice is the piece Rehearsals for Adulthood (2001), in which images are performative by nature, blending documentary and fictional components. Later on, I used the same approach to produce the projects My Unopened Letters (2004), Personal War Stories of an Outsider (2006), and Alienation Stories (2009).

a.s How did this project develop over time? Where did you start geographically? At which point and why did it become international in focus? 

j.s During 2009–11, I gathered anonymous stories of people on Finnish public forums online. But at some point, it became clear that it would be way more interesting and 
challenging to include stories in other languages and from around the world. Since the internet does not know any boundaries and is open for all people, it would have been wrong to stick to geographical boundaries.

a.s What was it you were looking for in the stories, while looking for them on the internet? Did they have to be “photogenic” in some way? Unique or banal, representative or contemporary?

j.s I valued and wanted to emphasize the role of chance in all major phases of the production. So, I always chose the nicknames that came up with a long body of text containing personal everyday observations. In other words, instead of focusing on how interesting the texts are, I considered the length, detailedness, and style to decide which anonymous story should end up as an image­reenactment. 

a.sHow would you describe the relationship between the entire story and its reenacted fragment? 

j.s The final images contain a scene, which had a significant impact on the anonymous author of each story. However, while doing these reenactments, I first and foremost pursued and tried to grasp the atmosphere and tensions observable within each story, so the main theme in a created picture usually differs from the one in the text. It is almost impossible for any of the anonymous writers to identify themselves in the finished works. 

a.s Given that you gathered stories from remarkably different geographical regions, where did you recruit the “actors” to reenact these stories in your Helsinki-based studio? 

j.s Excitingly enough, most of my actors lived in Finland, where today you could easily come across people from around the globe! So, I hired them according to the cultural context of where each recreated story originally happened.

a.s Your process of making reenactments reminds me of film production. What does the photography medium allow you to communicate that film doesn’t?

j.s Indeed, in some ways the creation process of Atlas of Emotions resembled production in cinema. But I had neither the team nor the funding comparable to filmmaking! Thankfully, I had some interns from Finnish art schools to help me out. The method I employ in photography has largely to do with utilizing human physicality—the one that was, for instance, described in the theatrical theories of Antonin Artaud (1896–1948), which emphasizes the actor’s body and movement. Photographs are just the physical presence of the subject. That makes some of Artaud’s primary physical methods, such as breathing techniques and Eastern dance styles, essential elements of my photographic practice.

a.s In addition to Grierson and Artaud, I wonder if there were any artists who shaped your photographic practice?

j.s I spent my youth in a small town in preinternet times. My knowledge of photography was confined to a local public library’s shelves with Finnish photography books. Hence, my work has always been strongly rooted in a national art photography tradition. At a later age, I realized how lucky I was: Finnish artists produced some of the world’s most interesting photography in the 1980s and early 1990s. The most impressive volume in the library was The Philosophy of Photography, which featured works by Ulla Karttunen, Heini Hölttä, Ulla Jokisalo, and Raakel Kuukka. Among them, Jokisalo’s style of approaching a person’s identity with a unique photographic language was the most transformative experience for me. 

a.s Do you have any failed stories, ones that you picked up, but which did not work in the end? 

j.s I have stories and images that have not been included in the final project. The reason has often been that I didn’t get the picture to work the way I wanted it to. That is to say, the reason was due to my unhappiness with the final image-reenactment, not with the initial story.

a.s Apart from communicating documentary value, do you invest any other meaning in the large landscape photograph that accompanies each story? 

j.s Landscapes are documents of spaces to which anonymous people’s stories belong. They create cultural frames for each story, produce a certain rhythm, and serve as a pause between often intensive reenacted stories.

a.s Among the twenty-two final stories from around the world, were there any that were more challenging or inspiring for you?

j.s Each image had its own challenges, but, actually, the toughest thing was to find the material on the internet forums, which was a rather monotonous and boring process.

a.s It is probably difficult to finish such a project, right? 

j.s It took me ten years to complete the project. It consisted largely of two time-consuming and slow-moving phases: research and material acquisition for the reenactments. These stages took up some 70% of the project’s time. But I was simultaneously involved in other projects. Such intentional overlaps have been beneficial and creative in various ways for my art practice for the last two decades.

a.s When I saw some of your earliest image-reenactments, I wondered how best to display them, to suggest that there is more to them than just the final photograph. 

j.s Yes, indeed, I tested many different alternatives and image sizes. And I am actually still thinking about it!

2006 – 2013

I take two steps on the corner of Obala Kulina bana & Zelenih beretki in Sarajevo

I take 174 steps in Lepola, Riihimäki

I take 17,000 steps on the Marco Polo Bridge in Beijing

I take 300,000 steps in Nanjing

I walk myself to exhaustion in Auschwitz-Birkenau

I take 237,000 steps on the coast of Normandy

I take hundreds of steps in the forest next to Pindush village in Karelia

I take 3,669 steps in front of the Radio building in Budapest

I walk on the edge of Dealey Plaza in Dallas

I walk in front of the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, New York

I walk on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis

I take hundreds – and thousands of steps in Tiananmen Square in Beijing

I take 8,100 steps in Srebrenica

I take 92 steps on Guryanova Street in Moscow

I take 45 steps in Račak village, Kosovo

I take 2,995 steps at Ground Zero, New York

2007 – 2008

I have photographed peaceful European cities through the aesthetics of war and violence.

Ordinary Towns on Ordinary Days is a photographic series depicting contemporary European cities through the visual language of war photography. In doing so, Silomäki renders ordinary, everyday situations — people, landscapes, and buildings — as though they were scenes from a war zone.

2004 – 2007

I examine the outsider’s experience of war and photography’s complex relationship to it as a documentary medium.

Personal War Stories of an Outsider constitutes a collage of images through which Silomäki explores his mediated relationship to war. For him, warfare is experienced only at a distance, as he has no direct participation in it. The work thus articulates the sensibility of a generation for whom war appears geographically and experientially remote, yet simultaneously omnipresent through its incessant circulation in the media. In this way, Silomäki underscores how war imposes itself upon contemporary subjectivity, compelling individuals to confront it and to assume a position in relation to it.

Upon closer scrutiny, the central concern of Silomäki’s practice does not lie in violence per se, but in the existential and ethical dilemmas that arise when an individual encounters realities that remain fundamentally opaque or incomprehensible. His work therefore shifts the discourse away from the spectacle of conflict towards the phenomenology of human response and the limits of understanding.

From a formal perspective, the project unfolds in two distinct yet interrelated sequences. In the first, Silomäki photographs the night sky and bullet-scarred walls in war zones, tracing imagined constellations in the perforations left by gunfire. This gesture transforms the residue of violence into a cosmological field, suggesting both fragility and transcendence. In the second sequence, the artist himself appears before the viewer, revealing his face and entering the scene only after the violence has subsided. These images evoke a sense of theatricality, as Silomäki inhabits the settings as though they were cinematic or Hollywood stage sets. This strategy situates the work within the broader discourse of post-documentary practice. While grounded in the evidentiary traces of conflict, the images foreground mediation, staging, and fictionality. Rather than offering transparent testimony, Silomäki interrogates the very conditions under which war can be represented, thereby complicating the viewer’s expectations of photography as a documentary medium.

Picnic on a mountain.
We imagine ourselves
to be guerrillas.

I am walking on a minefield for aesthetic purposes.

Ruins of homes
after hotel breakfast.

The wall is riddled
with bullet holes.
I fell one
with chewing gum.

2011

I have collected letters written by anonymous individuals at pivotal moments of the twentieth century.

One of the central themes in Jari Silomäki’s art is the position of the individual within the history of his or her own time. For this work, he gathered texts written by anonymous individuals at moments of major historical significance, including the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Kristallnacht, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Neil Armstrong’s landing on the Moon, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and September 11. Alongside the textual collage, the installation also includes a 16 mm film featuring iconic images from twentieth- century history, projected onto the bare, hunched back of an elderly man.

The U-2 reconnaissance flight revealed that the Soviet Union was constructing missile bases in Cuba. The world stood on the brink of nuclear war. Sirkka wrote:
“There is my darling, over there / beyond the ocean. Oh, why don’t you come, oh woe / I knew that you’d go, oh oh oh.”

The uprising began in the Warsaw Ghetto. On the same day, Viljo cursed the authorities:
“They took away my higher benefits category. I’m getting a medical certificate about my heart condition. They have to pay me my benefits. No way will I eat this mess they keep offering, not even if I have to pawn all my things to pay for it.”“The east wind is getting cold. I must start wearing the fur hat soon. Tapani has a slight cough—that is to say, he coughs sometimes, not always, at night. Spent the weekend in Järvenpää. I left on Saturday morning at eleven and returned on Sunday at half past five in the evening. Closed my eyes. No news, no new developments.”

Juan Perón was overthrown in Argentina. Helmi finished a postcard to her friend, writing:
“The apples have grown big and there are lots of them, also on the wild apple tree.”

Two Palestinian terrorists hijacked a Lufthansa Boeing 727 en route from Damascus to Frankfurt. Eila wrote:
“The east wind is getting cold. I must start wearing the fur hat soon. Tapani has a slight cough—that is to say, he coughs sometimes, not always, at night. Spent the weekend in Järvenpää. I left on Saturday morning at eleven and returned on Sunday at half past five in the evening. Closed my eyes. No news, no new developments.”

John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. On the same day, Aatto wrote:
“I’m surprised myself to be alive. But this depends (damn it all) on many things… My Danish (heart symbol) left last Saturday (tear symbol). Tristesse… You see, everything got OK before she left, I suppose. Wa-wa-woom, boy, we really had some fantastic nights…”

Soviet tanks rolled through the streets of Prague. At the same time, Eila wrote:
“I haven’t done any gardening even though it is autumn, and likely will not be doing anything. I don’t know if it is better to sell the house and then find a flat, or to try and exchange it. A boatload of big questions for me to think over.”

Demonstrations against Slobodan Milošević broke out in Belgrade. On that day, Vappu sent a postcard from the USA:
“Dear mother, I’m writing from this side of the border for a change. We are in Nevada, at a state park campsite. It is free, so there is no telephone here. It is thirteen miles to the nearest village to post this. John will take the postcard there (by moped).”

Nelson Mandela delivered his I Am Prepared to Die speech at the beginning of the Rivonia Trial. On that day, Liisa wrote:
“I wear the new hat and have gotten used to it. The girl is fine now. I don’t need anything to sweeten my coffee. The girl went to the eye doctor. Don’t need glasses.”

The Battle of Belleau Wood took place during the First World War. On the same day, Wilho attached a note:
“If you have strong work-cart wheels with axles, I ask you to dispatch one to me on my account.”

Japanese troops took Manila. On that day, Aino wrote:
“A healthy girl was born near two in the morning, so Kaarina is now a big sister — she is exactly three years and five months older than the new daughter. It was a happy reunion.”

16 mm film
Duration: 8 min 46 sec
Sound & design: Joni Virtanen
Camera operator: Veli Granö
Cast: Esko Puustinen

1997 – 2001

If she sits here
and Paavo, the loudest boy in the class sits here.
Then I’ll seat myself here.

She passes by right here on Monday at 11.45hrs towards the reading room.
I’ll place myself here, in front of the poetry section.

The Dreamer, after Man Ray

The feeling of joy has never been stronger that my fear of its loss.

I closed my eyes
imagine I’d been at the sea
my hole life,
opened my eyes.

1996

2024

Collaboration with Pekka Niittyvirta

The site-specific installation consists of two large-scale glass panes in opposing colours: blue-green and violet. Each pane filters the other, creating agrey zone when viewed from either side. The work changes according to the direction of light and the viewer’s position, producing shifting combinations of colour, form, and grey areas. These grey zones form an intermediate space in which two elements cancel each other out and appear as one. In other words, the grass is always grey on the other side of the fence — regardless of which side one occupies. Through abstraction, the work addresses the contractual concept of a border.

– Located at the Headquarters of the Southeast Finland Border Guard District
– Tempered glass
– 400 × 240 × 70 cm