Ile d’Enfance, 2019
“Those days when time seemed to stretch.
Like a founding ritual, every summer, filled with the cry of the cuckoo and the buzzing of the fly behind the window. The black fingers of blueberries, far away, the scent of wild rosemary. The days in nature and the landscape of my childhood, all these reminiscences that return through my daughter.
The series “Ile d’Enfance” is about childhood and identity. From the point of view of the child, and from my own memories. I work on this series partly in a posed way and partly spontaneously depending on the situation. As a photographer and mother, I follow and share my daughter’s development, the events of everyday life, the aching legs as she grows, the impatience of her grandmother’s visit or the death of the cat, everything that awakens my memories and has inspired my photographs in recent years. The pictures are partly composed in Finland, on an island where we go every August. Maybe this island has become the whole of Finland for my daughter, in any case the granite and the power of nature are everywhere around her during these stays. Another part of the images is composed where we live all year in France. The “in-between” creates a permanent duality that hides in a secret space inside you.”
Arja Hyytiäinen
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