About Katri
 

Katri Elisabet Lassila (born in 1979) is a photographic artist and Doctor of Arts (2023) from Aalto University. She wrote her doctoral thesis about the temporal aspects and apochrony of landscape between photography and cinema, which may be read here in Finnish. Katri is listed in the Finnish Artist Register. She is a member of the board of the Association of Photographic Artists.

Katri has had over 20 individual exhibitions in Finland and abroad since 1999 and she has taken part to several group and juried exhibitions and also worked herself as a curator and portfolio reviewer. She is the president and one of the founding members of the Finnish Darkroom Association which maintains darkroom Mörk at Helsinki, and organiser of the association’s international projects such as Helsinki Darkroom Festival, Nordic Analog Network and Analog Photography Festival Network. She teaches courses regularly for the association as well as for the Aalto University Photography and Film Departments. She was in charge of the university’s graduate seminar at the Film Department in 2019-2023.

Major part of her body of work has been created abroad, during the past fifteen years especially in Asia, although concerned about her carbon footprint she increasingly works in the closer areas nowadays. Recurring themes in Katri’s works are landscape and water, combined with the fleeting moments known from Henri Cartier-Bresson’s concept of the decisive moment.

I am interested in time, or rather the timelessness. In my dissertation I coined the term apochrony, deriving from the Greek words apo (ᾰ̓πό) and khronos (kroʊnɒs), to describe this outsideness of time. Scenes from which it is impossible to say when exactly they have taken place fascinate me constantly. Landscapes face sometimes rapid changes, while their bones may stay the same for aeons. I am interested in the essence of the landscape behind its immediate surface. At the same time I look for the scenes where this eternal quality faces the imminent, and the passing of time becomes visible by something which cannot be repeated. The great power of photography lies in the question of time, and the dichotomy of its simultaneous momentariness and permanence.

Katri’s photographic work consists mostly of analogue black and white photography with a strong emphasis in demanding techniques of fine art darkroom printing.

Darkroom work is my passion. I started training it with my mentor in 1999 and fell in love with it right away. I love the challenge it offers and continued with it incessantly through the digital revolution. I usually give several exposures for the print, which is called “burning”, and dodge it to find exactly the right tones. I also bleach some parts of the print chemically, tone it with photographic toners and spot the dust away by brush and colour. I seldom rely on exact recipes or formulas, instead using my artistic judgement to guide me through the process. Playing more by ear than fixating on sheet music, so to speak.

Of her equipment Katri loves the most the Rolleiflex 2.8 (from 1964, gift from her mentor Pentti Sammallahti), but ventures sometimes with 4x5 and 35mm cameras. The recent years she has started to work also with moving images. Her poetic short film Chalk Circles (2015) was screened at the festivals apart from Helsinki in Prague and Riga. Her latest short film and the artistic part of her dissertation The Cliff (2022), taking inspiration from Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) and Kanerva Cederström’s Trans-Siberia – Notes from the camps (1999), has been photographed with Leica M3 and the photographs combined digitally in the form of moving image.