Lapland Dislocated: Jorma Puranen's Photography and Anthropology

• Published in: Journal of Finnish Studies
• Main Author: Markowska, Martyna
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of Illinois Press 2013
• Subjects: sami; Lapland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/28315081.16.2.09; https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/jfs/article-pdf/16/2/130/1609814/130markowska.pdf

Abstract The photographic art of Jorma Puranen (1951–) depicts Lapland through the intersection of image and text. Over the course of his career, Puranen's publications have emerged as a consequence of his photographic projects. For instance, Imaginary Homecoming records a haunting trip to the indigenous past of Lapland and the Sami people, and has become one of Puranen's most recognized works. Lapland, as a geographical place, can be considered “dislocated” because of its specific lingual and ethnographic character. Spread across the territories of four nations without a single common language, Lapland remains one of the most unknown and scarcely described regions in the world. Puranen, working in the Nordic photographic tradition, has created several projects in which he analyzes the roots of Sami ethnicity. Moreover, the displacement of Lapland and the Sami people reflects other types of displacement present in Puranen's art. One type is the dislocation of images into the landscape, and another type, the displacement of images into text. This article examines these metaphors along with the artistic strategies applied by the artist. Three dichotomies are present in Puranen's albums and necessary to understand his project: art versus anthropology, nature versus cultural heritage, and photographs versus text. These three distinctions provide the starting point for this article, and, further, they provide theoretical framework for the examination.