Eeva Karhu (born 1980, Kirkkonummi, Finland) studied photography at Helsinki's Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture. She uses nature and its seasonal passing as her guide to measure and translate our world by the power of its presence in our daily lives.
'When Eeva Karhu walks out of her front door some thirteen kilometres from the centre of Helsinki, she very much looks as if she intends to walk in a straight line. She takes a photograph and heads for the horizon. Her works are full of the horizon, each individual work is the amalgam of 86 different photographs, harvesting light from one moment to the next. The result is not just one place, but an emotional space which she travels through to find the beginning and ending of every day, a passage of time. After a while of looking at her photographs one starts seeing a single figure in the centre of the picture. It is coming to claim us rather like Omar Sharif in the scene where he slowly appears out of the desert in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. Though there is an element of the same purity as in Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes, she is not pursuing the near perfect horizontal line of the sea or desert. Her feet are firmly on Finnish soil and the pictures trace her path to the horizon and back. If she lived in a desert or on the sea her method would only require two photographs, one at the point of departure and the other at the point she decreed the horizon, but the trees, houses, hillocks, bushes and other features of the landscape on her doorstop requires her to halt 86 times, and take another picture of another horizon.' (Alistair Hicks)