EXPO PENTTI SAMMALLAHTI "MINIATURES"

September 18, 2020 - January 24, 2021

Charles Negro Museum of Photography
1 Place Pierre Gautier - Nice

From September 18, 2020 to January 24, 2021, the City of Nice invites you to discover the exhibition dedicated to Pentti Sammallahti, "Miniatures", at the Charles Negro Museum of Photography.

The miniature is a small painting, whose precise rendering calls for the slow gesture of the copyist monk, bent over his work, like a goldsmith of the "tiny". It is this same finesse, the same delicacy, slow and radiating, that emerges the surface of Pentti Sammallahti's photographs.

From the vast deserts of the White Sea of Solovski in Russia, to the dense forests of Central Europe populated by unlikely animals, and to the far reaches of the world, each image is a small story, a fable, a legend that says in a few words that it is enough to see for beauty to exist. And, whether he casts his gaze from afar or poses it closely, Sammallahti knows how to give every detail,however tenuous, a leading role in his Miniatures, as essential as a musical note in a score. His gaze digs the visible from the inside and brings these small native particles to the surface of the world, like coal dust, lighter than air.

Pentti Sammallahti was born in Helsinki in 1950. The grandson of one of Finland's first female photographers, Hilldur Larsson (1882-1952), he became interested in photography at the age of 9, while his father took him to see Edward Steichen's travelling exhibition "The Family of Man" at the Taidehalli in Helsinki in 1959. He began taking his first photographs at the age of eleven and joined Helsinki Camera Club. He built his own enlarger and experimented with development, shooting and drawing. He studied Art History, Musicology and Mathematics. In 1970, he presented his first solo exhibition and, four years later, he became a teacher at the Lahti Art School, then at the Higher School of Arts and Design in Helsinki, where he taught photography and printing. In 1991, on a 15-year state grant, he ended his teachings, founded a workshop and multiplied his photographic expeditions to various countries in Europe and Asia.

Wandering through vast territories, often remote, and vast unlocated or sparsely populated spaces, he gives free rein to his quest for a particular light or an unsuspected horizon, using the panoramic format, of which he is one of the undisputed masters, his science of subtle contrasts and an exceptional palette of the tones of black and white. Sometimes referred to as the "Bruegel of film art", Pentti Sammallahti manages, through his genius of the landscape, to "substantialize" the winter which, under his gaze, seems more material than season.