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Steven Psyllos: Please describe the process of your art-making. Do you have a certain image in mind or is the process more organic?
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Kai Lintumaa – Steven Psyllos
Steven Psyllos: Please describe the process of your art-making. Do you have a certain image in mind or is the process more organic?
Kai Lintumaa: My process varies a lot, there are times when I know exactly what I am trying to create, be it a composite or a single shot, while at other times the process is entirely organic, almost to the point of being experimental and even accidental. Many times, the final image is the result of a directed play with the digital image tools that I employ.
SP: Your creations have a very cinematic sensibility, but your work in film and video is obviously very different than your work in still imagery. Describe what a still shot can give that a film cannot? What do you enjoy about still photography?
KL: While the basics of both are similar (after all, film is really just single frames in a rapid succession), there usually is a pre-guided narrative that is explicit in the story, i.e. the photography in film is to aid the story, to realize the vision of the director. In still photography, since it, usually, is only a single frame, the narrative is in some ways freer, and takes place in the head of the viewer based on the elements within the frame. This subjective narrative, then, can be quite different from the one I had in my mind when I was working on the image. And this is probably the aspect of still photography I enjoy the most, what the image brings up in the mind of the observer, by necessity, since the image stops at one frame. This is not to say that film cannot achieve this, but the narrative film idea generally does not aim at leaving things to the viewer’s imagination in this way.
SP: How does your mastery of digital manipulation contribute to the final product/image?
KL: This varies quite a bit depending on the image itself. I have taken photos that were pretty much left as they were taken, except for some clean-up, removing lens dirt or a minor crop here and there. But, in many instances, the manipulation is almost a necessity for me because I am really not trying to create photorealistic or photojournalistic output; rather, I am interested in what else the image can do, where else I can take it and, for that, digital manipulation is an awesome tool and a very important part of the final product.
SP: Your abstract work is painterly. At what point do these images stop being what was initially focused upon, before your lens, and turn into something else?
KL: Sometimes almost immediately if there was an intent behind them. The technique used usually leads to an abstraction of sorts, such as an extremely soft focus or the use of motion blur. Other times, it takes a while as I am looking for the look I am after by playing with the images and so I often end up with an abstraction of the original. There are also times when the abstraction comes from simply looking at the image differently, say, upside down or with some other kind of reversal of the original.
SP: What is your favorite series of work? Please discuss the inspiration behind it.
KL: I really like the “Aurora Urbanis” series because of what they are shots of in relation to how different they actually look. The inspiration was obviously the Aurora Borealis. I was interested in something that looked like this phenomenon while actually being something quite mundane—something that we see every day. The images themselves are long exposures taken from the window of a moving cab in New York at night, covering about a city block.
SP: What are you working on now? What sorts of work are you leaning towards?
KL: I am getting more and more drawn into the idea of “impermanence” or “transcience,” the so-called Wabi-sabi aesthetic. I am also finding myself interested in combining this idea of simplicity and memory with certain written or audio sensory input into a single image, e.g. the lyric “liquid shadows” from a song by Dream Theater and how well: a) it can be made into a visual representation and, b) how well it matches with the idea of impermanence, as shadows change as soon as they are created. Plus, the words themselves just kind of do something for me, they are so deliciously descriptive.
SP: How did you select the work exhibited at the Broadway Gallery?
KL: The artworks were selected to show a range of work, I prefer not to stick with just one way of doing things or to photographing a certain type of image. Rather, I like to work in a non-linear fashion by learning new things, be they technique or tool related, or to create new ways to look at things and to frame them in a fresh way—to combine visuals that are interesting to me or that remind me of something else. So, while there were some images that were clearly part of a series (“Aurora Urbanis,” for instance), most of the photos are not serial in nature, but exist by themselves. The selection was aimed at showing just that.
