Spellbound: Elena Näsänen’s Photograph of the sea

Elena Näsänen’s investigation into the very nature of watching is an elaborate exercise in point-of-view. Like a window seen at twilight, Photograph of the sea never quite delivers on its promise of perfect transparency. Because of the engaging surface of the image and the construction of the experience, it is simultaneously reflective and transparent - to be used for both looking at and looking through - exploring the boundaries of the medium itself and challenging viewer's expectations at every turn.

A subtle and mature work, Photograph of the Sea is a psychological detective story that draws on the conventions of Hitchcockian technique to construct an intricate puzzle of reflected personality. Aware that the most powerful means of sustaining interest and attention is by employing the techniques of suspense, Näsänen draws the spectator into her piece using hand-held camera, an uninterrupted point-of-view shot, and other viewer identification techniques. Seemingly infatuated by the ways in which attention is focussed, Näsänen revels in the opportunities for subversion that result from its wilful misdirection.

The artist’s knowledge that we have been conditioned to identify some film styles and camera positions as more ‘real’ than others is used to direct our awareness onto the mechanics of her narrative so that we begin to notice how we perceive the story she elaborates. And by probing the relationship between the watcher and the watched, she implicates the viewer of the film in the creation of its meaning. With a fluid virtuosity of movement, the artist lets her camera roam around as if looking for something - inviting the audience to seemingly discover the story along with her. As the camera glides, sweeps and drifts through a domestic interior, the soundtrack provides audio cues independent from anything seen onscreen that engages us in the process of constructing the experience. And even when finally releasing us from hermetic world of the manmade into the wide open spaces of the natural world, by continuing to foreground the interests of the camera, the exterior appears just as unstable and ‘closed’ an image as the interior world we have seemingly left behind. In drwaing us ever forward in a very comforting and familiar manner while simultaneously problematizing any definitive reading of the images she presents, the artist introduces a level of dissonance and uncertainty that remain long after the piece concludes.

Christopher Gordon, Curator

‘Who do you think you are?’
Pia Euro, Tanja Koponen, Elena Näsänen
Anna Akhmatova Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2006.