Seurasaari: Homey Foreignness
Seurasaari is the embodiment of how I felt about Helsinki. Although completely foreign to what I had known, I’ve rarely felt as welcomed, be it by the outdoors or the people.
As temperatures dropped recently in France (giving us a little wintery feel) I look back, through my photographs, on a month-long trip I took to Helsinki, Finland in winter 2022.
From behind the window, I can see the snow falling steadily. The ground is completely white and powdery. I smile at the idea of how cold it’s gonna be. It’s around 11am and the sun finally rose. I guess it rose, somewhere behind the grey, snow carrying clouds. I’m stuck to the window, all I can think about is stepping out, feeling the weight of my pack on my shoulders and the noise the fresh snow makes under my wool-hugged feet. Plus, we have some leftover veggie and cheese crepes, the perfect reason to go out for a walk (just needed to fill up the Thermos with some hot chocolate).
The plan is to walk around Seurasaari Island. The island is well known to be one of many pockets of nature within a stone's throw of Helsinki’s centre. For some time, the island was used to let cattle graze but toward the very end of the 19th century, it was turned into a place dedicated to outdoor recreation for the working-class communities living in the workers’ district surrounding the island. Nowadays, Seurasaari Island remains a popular spot for Helsinkians. Walking through the small yet densely wooded island, you get submerged by a feeling of familiarity, as if welcomed by a warm memory. At least, this is what Seurasaari felt to me, and those welcoming friends were birds and squirrels (more on that later).
At the time I was staying for a couple of weeks with my partner in crime and hall of fame druid little brother who taught me the joy of walking. Because he was not living that far from the island, we decided to walk from his apartment to there. While the snow kept on falling, I started to overheat pretty quickly as there was close to no wind and temperatures were actually over 0°C. Where people used to join the island by boat, we arrived in through the bridge built shortly after the island was opened for outdoorsy leisure.
The dense forest, high trees, and snowy trails create an atmosphere of an enchanted forest. As you walk around the island you feel transported in time, to whatever time when you didn’t have to worry about much. To those times all you thought about was staying outside, sitting in the grass until you were forced to get back in, when you took a strange pride in your mud-stained clothes. I walked through this peaceful excitement, my eyes trying to look at everything, restlessly trying to soak in as much as I could.
We knew the animals of the island were used to human presence and would gladly be fed by visitors, so we obliged and brought some food for birds. It was the first time I interacted with a wild animal this intimately. I just took some nuts and reached my hand out; and while I was looking at those little wings flapping in the naked branches above my hands, I could see something approaching fast in the corner of my eye. My whole body immediately freezes and I try to be as still as the forest, but I can feel my heart stomping through my chest and the multiple layers of merino wool and gore-tex shell. Can this little black-capped chickadee feel it as well? Or is it just enjoying the wide array of nuts I provide, thinking “Yeah, they all react like that, no worries man”.
This moment right here, little me, in a little forest, with a little bird eating in the palm of my hand might have been one of the most significant points in the progression of my relation with nature. This small black-capped chickadee, with its claws gently gripping my fingers has taken me to a short moment of complete connection with the living world surrounding me; incarnating — in all its little bird body — the connectedness to nature I had been reading about for so long.
More photos and additional notes
All photos were taken on a Fujifilm XT-4 and an XF35mm f1.4 lens (the 35mm equivalent of a 53mm focal length). At the time of this trip, I was still at the early stage of my photography journey (and even more so of my digital photography journey). Which explains some quirks in my images. But now, I regard these as funny or interesting… and with a lot of compassion for my younger photographer self.
For some reason that I cannot recall, I persisted in shooting wide open (systematically between f1.4 and f2.8 at the narrowest), which explains the vignetting and some optical imperfections in the images (apparent to a haze or veil in certain images). Nevertheless, however imperfect, these images still take me back to those winter walks in Finland.
