Photographer, artist
JUHA METSO


His studio is situated in Kotka, at the back of a yard belonging to an old, massive yellow Jugend-style building. It resembles a flea market, stuffed with tables overflowing opened art magazines, computer discs and discarded coffee mugs, all sorts of necessities. Old suitcases and a guitar can be seen on top of some high cupboards, and here and there looms a stuffed seagull.

- We were just common people as kids, my sister and I, labourer’s children as most everyone then. At school I just did the primary and secondary, plus a couple of years of high school, which was required in order to be accepted to the art school in Lahti. In between I studied at a technic school for awhile, and did some workshop classes. Once I even held down a job at the glass factory in Karhula, where I was a form repair man for Finlandia vodka bottles.
- I still enjoy it immensely when I can do some labourer-shooting, take pictures of good old decent working folk.

- I started off as a photographer of birdlife – I’ve had birds as a hobby all my life. My newspaper career began at the local Etela-Suomi (“Southern Finland”) daily in Kotka in 1984, and in 1987 I was accepted at the Lahti Art School’s photography department, from where I graduated in 1991. My still ongoing freelance career as a regular photographer for the main Finnish daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat began already during my studies, in 1989.
- And now I’m 39 years old, married, and the father of three daughters: Iida, Meri and Alli.

One can’t accuse Juha Metso of laziness: around thirty group exhibitions and twenty solo exhibitions. They have all displayed his characteristic personality, which manifested itself already in his Final Exam work at the Lahti Art School. It was called “The truth - pictures for happy people” and shown at the Lahti Design Institute. For the series Metso had to gather a hundred friends, fit them in their best funerals-and-weddings-type suits and dresses, and cart them (and a horse) off to a huge communal waste dump in Kotka for posing. One picture showing the whole group was blown up to cover a wall from corner to corner, while the other one hundred happy faces hung from the ceiling.

The “Art Stevedores” group together with painters Timo Mahonen and Heimo Suntio also was a big project which gathered lots of interest.
- Yeah, we were three blokes and it worked for three years. Then it was over, there were conflicts as all three were such personalities and highly original people. We stopped just as exhibition invitations from all over the world started raining in, we called it quits at the point where the doors had started to open everywhere. Still, in hindsight it feels it was the right thing to end it there.

Another project called “The Life Of Albert” was seen by hundreds of thousands on the internet. It was done in collaboration with journalist-author Matti Tieaho, and before swelling all over, it started as a project for the Finnish “Kamera” magazine in 1998.

Slightly annoyed

- My work is divided. There’s this journalistic side, and then the art side which is quite broad. This latter thing has given me an added boost. We’re all geniuses, of course, but the fact I can visualize my idealism as the sort of fantasy pictures I make, that I can photograph myself and my friends and laugh at the same time, that’s important to me. I enjoy working with a broad palette, not just tight documentaries.
- I don’t hesitate to say 95 percent of all the so called “photo art” today is total bullshit – as my own pictures can be in some people’s minds. It’s all emotional. I’m not interested in the trends of today, these therapeutic mother-son pictures. I just throw my own stuff into this mess, and lean back to see how it reaches people.
- Also, I hate the kind of exhibitions where I’m first given a memo as some kind of pointer towards what I’m supposed to aim. In this business, there’s the ones who talk, and then there’s the ones who take pictures. I represent the ones who take pictures, I’m really bad at verbalising what I do. I don’t have the need to talk up my pictures either, to give them value with words. If they don’t work in the time and place where they’re presented, then they don’t work. That’s it, period.

Metso constantly drums the side of the table with his fingers, every now and then omitting a deep sigh. The listener gets the impression a major part of the problems of the world weigh on his shoulders. But maybe it’s just that he doesn’t like to be interviewed.

After trying out his wings here and there, Juha Metso has ended up with the so called clean document. At least in my opinion this is where he so far has shown his greatest strength, as well as gaining most recognition. The ten-picture series that gave him the title “Press Photographer of the Year” is straightforward, versatile and powerful. Still, I like his series from the Ethiopian drought and hunger region, which came in second in the documentary class, even more. When I first spotted the pictures in Helsingin Sanomat – especially the big vertical picture on the cover, where a black kid stands in a water hole in the foreground and throws water buckets upwards while dozens of camels get distressed in the background – I thought “I’ll be doggone if this won’t be chosen Press Photo of the Year!”
It wasn’t. Juha Metso was chosen Press Photographer of the Year, though, and that was important. He deserves it.

You gotta have the spark

- As a freelancer you have to pack your bags every time the phone rings. You can’t say “no” that many times, or after a while it ceases ringing.
- The best part of press photography is when you get to go on a gig photographing something you can’t prepare for. Your toes freeze in the cold, and there’s a hell of a lot of adrenaline pumping into your blood. A stake-out, for instance, where you have to run away from the police who tries to catch you, and look for angles while running, ahead of the police! Of course you don’t want to do this every day, though.
- There exists some trends inside press photography, and there are clearly photographers who represent one certain style. I want to be versatile, I’d like to learn everything in this field – all the time, more and more, as long as there’s life in me.
- And now we get to what journalism really is. People talk about their “own handwriting”, their style, but in a sense that’s against the whole idea of journalism: the authentic picture. What is an authentic picture, then? Think about it.
- I think authenticity dies the moment I stroll along in my leather jacket to shoot a picture of something. I start to circle the object, shooting off in a rapid succession all the time. But somehow the situation opens up, and the object forgets about the camera. In these situations I step up to the person, and don’t try to shoot from a hidden place. They see the camera, everything works out, there’s no fooling about – and BAM, there it is.

- One should be able to distill, to capture the essential. I’ve come to the conclusion the world can’t be healed, one can only wonder about its peculiarities.
- When I come back home from a foreign assignment, I’m always a bit soft in the head. I’ve gotten so much new information from all over, and every time you turn your head there’s more. It’s tough. For instance, getting arrested in Kosovo after the war there…. I don’t want to be labelled anything even close to heroic – I was just arrested like so many others. They told me: “Now you will die, now you will die”. In that situation, my legs shook, when I realized there’s no help in talking, and the end result can be quite dramatic.

- I was scared, of course, but you have to keep yourself together and not break down in a situation like that. If you want to cry, do it at home. If you break down on location, then you can’t really even consider going there in the first place.

The Lahti Art School

- The time I spent in Lahti was damn interesting, and I really do defend photo studies from my heart. Of course, everything is up to one’s own attitude. I saw my time as a student from the point of getting a chance. I thought I was given a unique chance.
- I had some friends in my class, and there were other students also, who went on complaining about there not being enough input in Lahti. They had sort of gone through the teachers and professors, and sucked out what these had to give, which one does in about a year or so.
- Some of these friends felt they had come to a border, on the other side of which the school couldn’t educate them any more. My view was that it was a place which supplied the equipment; that I could freely do whatever I felt like. If I needed information about some gadget, I could ask. I don’t need teachers or professors to supply me with ideas. They’re my ideas – either I have some, or then I don’t.

- From the start I knew I’ll be an artist when I grow up. Later I discovered the camera is my optical brush, it represents the same thing for me as a paint brush does to a painter. It gets me to paradise and to hell – I’ve seen both through the lens. I’ve seen sights really ugly, and others equally beautiful.
- An optical brush… of course it may also mean I can’t draw at all, with a pencil, even if my life depended on it. Even in Lahti I only drew one-line figures, like the Simon Templar symbol. I actually think I’m the worst drawer who ever was accepted at the Lahti Art School! I had to draw in the qualifying competition when I went there, and later heard it was my ideas that got me accepted, and that these outweighed my “horrible drawing talents”.

Kotka

- But hey, I’ve got to say a few words about Kotka too. I was born here, I know my way around these streets and back yards, and I like and enjoy Kotka. Of course it’s a bit small at times, mentally inbred etcetera, what you’ll find in any small town. But on the whole it’s great.
- And we Kotka-inhabitants have quite a strong identity and connection to this place. 55.000 people. Then we have the harbour, the biggest export harbour in all Finland, and it’s teeming with vitality, and we have the sea. Almost every person in Kotka either owns a boat or has a friend who does. When I go on pension I’ll get my own.

I gather my things, and Metso gives me a whole bagful of digital photos to take with me to the newspaper. He trots off to pick up his youngest daughter from the communal day care center, and I start driving towards Helsinki through a thick snow blizzard. One of my all time favourites, the Kotka-born singer-songwriter Juha Vainio sings his song “Kotka Lads Without Wings” on the CD player. Juha Metso can’t fly either, but he’s got quite impressive wing stumps.

And somehow I feel I’ve gotten much more out of Juha Metso than from many others who see themselves as smooth with words. You recognise a good photographer from the quality of his pictures, and good photos aren’t born unless the photographer has developed some good thinking to back them up with. Or let’s put it this way: thinking in general.

text: Seppo Saves (2001)
translated from Finnish by John Knuta



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