Santeri Tuori (born 1970, Espoo, Finland) studied at the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Helsinki. A multifaceted artist, Santeri Tuori's work is primarily focussed on the properties of nature and its power to change. Photographing in his native Finland his recent subjects include skies, forests and waterlilies.
For the Forest series Tuori has spent much time on the remote island of Kökar in the Aland archipelago in southwestern Finland. He photographs repeatedly the same place, from the identical spot, at different seasons and times of day, sometimes years apart. Multiple images, both black and white and colour, are then superimposed. Likewise, the moving images from the Forest series are the result of layering colour video with black and white photographs. This gives the films the clarity and richness of a photograph fused with the movement and time of a video. The series, like all his work, reveal his preoccupation with the passage of time.
The sky is usually viewed in reference to ground, water or vegetation, but Tuori's Sky series concentrates solely on the sky as a subject in its own right. The artist again layers black and white and colour photographs, giving some more prominence while others are only vaguely suggested, resulting in images that seems as if on the border of painting and photography and allow the viewer total immersion in skyscapes of great depth and luminosity. Here the traditions of painting are for Santeri Tuori as relevant as the traditions of photography.
In a process similar to those of the Forest and Sky series, for the Water Lilies Tuori photographed the flowers and pads in lakes and ponds over a extendedperiod of time. The ensuing works are multi-layered images with two or more layers on top of each other taken at different times. In some the same layer might be present more than once; in black and white, in colour, sometimes inverted into negative. The image becomes abstracted; no longer a specific record of the original lake and water lilies, but more the essence and memory of the place.
A major monograph Santeri Tuori, Time Is No Longer Round was published by Hatje Cantz, 2020. A retrospective exhibition, Santeri Tuori, Photography and Video Works, is currently on view at the Serlachius Museum, Gosta, 2021-22. Santeri Tuori is included in the current exhibitions Caspar David Friedrich - Art For A New Age at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, 15 Dec 2023 - 01 Apr 2024 and Human / Nature at Fotografiska New york, 9 February - 25 May 2024.