It’s said that some photographers photograph the world as it is, and some as they wish it could be. I tend to fall somewhat more into the latter category. I believe in being a truth-teller but I do follow my enchantments.
During a month-long artist residency in northern Finland some years ago, I was charmed not just by the magical, nonstop midsummer light of late June. My enchantment was also due to finding myself in the land of certain storybook heroes.
As I wrote back then about the photos I made along the way:
I am always most interested in the undercurrents of a place. In Finland I encountered subtle contrasts of dream and reality, past and present, modern and rustic, warm and cold, and shadow and light. The light has a primal effect on both the psyche and physiology, with a dizzying vitality and presence of its own. Yet it seems to never fully banish the blue palette of the Great North. The pervasive blue is like the menacing Groke in Tove Jansson’s lyrical tales, a reminder that winter’s cold will soon return.
Who? If you didn’t grow up in northern Europe, Russia, or Japan, there’s a good chance you haven’t heard of Tove Jansson - or the Moomins.
Tove Jansson was a Swedish-Finnish artist and children’s book author in the early-mid 20th century. For me, discovering her universe of Moomins characters was like opening a previously unseen door to a unknown way of being.
The famous storybooks and picture books were ostensibly for kids, but I’d say barely. I found them when my daughter was young and, while she loved the characters and we still bond over Moomins now that she’s in her teens, I was utterly hooked by the slightly thorny Nordic melancholy in the stories and artwork. Maybe my favorite character was Snufkin, a bohemian wanderer and Moomin’s best friend.
Both of these guys reminded me a bit of Snufkin:
Jansson was first and foremost an artist, and besides being a painter she illustrated covers for anti-fascist magazines during the rise of Hitler. She was also somewhat of a sexual libertine, in same-sex relationships when that was illegal in Finland.
The Moomins’ world she created was in part her artistic response as war darkened life in Finland — an idealistic, even utopian antidote to despair and thugs on the march. Sound familiar?
It was a quirky, idiosyncratic vision but a humanistic one. Strange and even unsettling things happen, but in the mostly reassuring world of Moominvalley, friends are friends, adventures are to be had, true predators are few (sometimes there are slight jerks), songs matter, respect and kindness (but not necessarily over-sentimentality, this is Finland after all) are valued, and you can always find another bed in your house for an unexpected guest, even an odd one.
The stories are often infused with nature’s raw power that can turn surprisingly dark: a comet headed for Moominvalley, storms, and floods. And encroaching winter, personified by the menacing (but ultimately just lonely) character Groke, who freezes the ground she walks on.
Is the Groke coming?
I’ve long been fascinated by Tove Jansson and think about her example - making complex but joyful art as a rebuttal to dark times - often in our own times.
Looking back now on my pictures from Finland, ten years later, I can see more clearly the semi-conscious references I was making, maybe channeling my inner Moominvalley. At the time I wasn’t really sure what I was doing, I was just shooting and responding intuitively in a new place. I pulled a few selections for this post, though I can’t explain exactly why they feel Moomin-ish to me. They just do.
They are definitely a different style compared to my usual. First of all the color (I usually work in black and white) but also they are very quiet and unassuming. Not trying too hard, content to be little mood-fragments. Which is also very Finnish, that notion of equanimity — “don’t go thinking you’re better than others”.
And that light!
If you bundled the personal qualities of Tove Jansson herself and the world she created for the Moomins — tolerance, solidarity, egalitarianism, respect for nature and all creatures, anti-materialism, imagination, creativity — this free spirit from another time would make a perfect art-warrior in the face of our contemporary problems.
It would even be a quite fine new religion: Moominism!
But since religion and various -isms often seem to cause as many problems as they solve, let’s at least call Moominism more of a secular thing, like humanism.
Either way, count me in. If we could all be a little more like her, and them, the world would be just fine.
Let the Moomins Revolution begin — inspired by a mid-century painter-turned-children’s-author and carried forward by artists, writers, poets, dreamers, nonconformists, and humanists everywhere.
• • •
[Originally published November 28, 2023 on Medium]
