The Helsinki Photo Festival organisation, HELPHOTO, has brought a photography exhibition by David Lynch to Helsinki. The Infinite Deep exhibition, which has toured the world, features 120 of Lynch’s photographs.
– Provocative.
Lynch is best known for his iconic series and his films that seek out dreamlike, idiosyncratic moods, but as a photographer he is less well known to the general public – especially outside the US.
Lynch’s first photography book, , was published in 2014. At the same time, he held a photography exhibition in London. The theme of both the book and the exhibition was the rather traditional black and white photographs of abandoned factories and industrial environments that Lynch had spotted in places like Poland and Germany.
As is overflowing.
– Every artist has his own trademark, and Lynch has become a cult director precisely because of surrealism. This comes across in everything he does, be it visual art or music. The Lynchian surrealism is also overlapped by the melodrama simmering somewhere deep down, Rafael Rybczynski states.
A video game-like atmosphere of horror
At times, Lynchian Surrealism takes on quite gruesome and horror-indicating forms. – about the dark villains of the video game series.
The Idea photo series, on the other hand, is based on nude photos from the 1920s, from which Lynch has adapted his own, strangely twisted versions.
The whole exhibition is balanced by the comical snowmen that Lynch photographed especially in the 1990s.
– Photos of snowmen show that Lynch has a sense of humor. In Lynch’s hometown, it snows quite a bit in the winter, says Rafael Rybczynski.
David Lynch’s photographs are on display in a very special place in Helsinki. The exhibition space is a former ship terminal located in Jätkäsaari, from which there are frequent trips to, for example, Tallinn. The terminal built in 1941 will be demolished in the next few years.
– I’ve been looking for a thousand square meter space in Helsinki for half a year. Of course, such premises can be found if you have a quarter of a million euros at your disposal. However, we are a new association that does not have such financial resources. When I visited here for the first time, I was like wow, this place is absolutely perfect for our purposes. In my opinion, this is also somewhat reminiscent of Stockholm’s Fotografiska, Rafael Rybczynski summa.