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  ©Pentti Sammallahti

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A Finland’s leading photographer, Pentti Sammallahti is introduced for the first time in Japan.

Sammallahti is well known for his photographs of men and animals in daily life captured against the natural landscape. Dogs and a snow-motorcycle left around the corner of a snow-covered hamlet, and a man with a horse plowing the field are some of the typical scenes shown in his photographs. He has visited beyond Finland such countries as Russia, Ireland, Hungary, China, Japan, Nepal and England, and photographed the cultural and natural climate of the countries.

He started in 1969 a ten-year project of photographing the origin of Finland, and continued the program after he took a teaching position in 1974. He visited Ireland in 1978 under a three-year state artist grant from his government, and took photographs in Hungary, Japan and China in 80’s. He made frequent trips for photographing the White Sea and the Dovina Karelia region in 90’s. He has been traveling to Portugal, Spain, France and Italy under a fifteen-year state artist grant in 1991, and continues photographing and making prints. 

Pentti Sammallahti, a representative photographer of Finland, has been introduced widely in Scandinavian countries, including his own motherland. His work has been recognized also in France, England and the United States since 1ate in the 90’s, and collected in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris and the Pushkin Art Museum, Moscow. 

Some 40 black and white photographs taken in Finland, Russia, and many other countries in the 70’s to the present are shown publicly for the first time in Japan.

Pentti Sammallahti

Born in Helsinki, Finland in 1950. Sammallahti began photographing at the age of eleven and had his first solo exhibition in 1971.

He has traveled in many country as well as Finland, photographing people and animals with landscapes in a dairy life with a poetic eye. He taught at the University of Art and Design Helsinki until receiving the Finnish State’s 15-year artist grant in 1991. His first exhibition in Japan was held at Photo Gallery International in February, 2003. Sammallahti came to Japan for a photography project “European Eyes on Japan / Japan Today” in 2005, and stayed in Fukushima for one month. This project had been exhibited in Japan and Europe in 2006.

Exhibition at PGI