Self Portraits and Inner Life in Death Valley
The following is an excerpt from our interview with landscape and portrait photographer Ville Kansanen. We talk about his project Procession of Spectres, in which Kansanen explores his own recovery from depression, which he likens to a loss of selfhood that requires reconstruction.
“I fail at being myself in so many other aspects of my life but when I create photographs, I feel my most authentic self, and it seemed like a natural progression to put myself literally into them. The performance aspect of my work is at times intoxicating and hypnotizing, and at times it is very painful and agonizing. I know it sounds trite but I feel it is a very spiritual experience; it overrides all my conceptions of comfort and limitations. There is something incredibly special about actually touching the landscape instead of merely recording it.
The contemporary industrialized view and use of nature and land is as inventions. Nature is something we vacation in, put into pictures, or subjugate for industry. However, our self is tied to an on-going natural evolution — it is not separate from anything that we see in the world. I feel like that process has been psychologically diverted from nature by our inventions. I try to use landscape as a framework to communicate the internal friction we experience being “outside of the natural world” by placing myself directly into it. That act changes how the landscape is read — it becomes an internal, metaphysical world.
Places like Bonneville and Death Valley are never entered — they are encountered — you became acutely aware of being at the mercy of the heat, howling wind, dry air, the corrosive salt, and sometimes freezing cold. Everything you thought of, precautions, plans, and sketches refined in the comfort of your home are likely going to fail to a certain degree. I always have a threshold period of adapting to that sense of elemental chaos and it always produces disastrous and wonderful accidents. You just need to let go of control and let inquiry and intuition take over.
Landscape is also about space. We travel from one various-sized space to another in our daily lives. You can theoretically go for days without seeing the horizon. Everything is constantly obscured by something man-made. I find that deeply depressing.”
