This image of Milla Virtanen inside the Organum in Hailuoto was shot on Fujifilm Polaroid on a Hasselblad 500 C/M. Lighting combines flash and the ambient: everything inside the structure is lit with four flashes.
When it came time to photograph poster art for the second iteration of VILLA, I decided to try out some Polaroid. Instant film=instant art, see? That’s the joke, but turns out Polaroid shot on a medium format back really brought a nice, weirdly painterly feel to a piece that’s quite mysterious.
VILLA (not a type of house, but ‘wool’ in Finnish) is a performance piece combining contemporary dance, visual arts, sound and light design, as is par for the course for Flow Productions. As the name suggests, wool is at the core of the piece as it is the material used in the costumes. Thematically it ties into humans and nature and so forth.
The costumes are created by artist and costume/set designer Pirjo Valinen. VILLA has three different versions: a gallery version with an exhibition of installations made of wool and featuring a ‘live installation’ with Pirjo Yli-Maunula dancing in one of the costumes, an outside performance on the island of Hailuoto just outside of Oulu, and on stage in Cultural Centre Valve, Oulu.
For the gallery version that took place in early this year, VILLA was promoted by really cool illustrations by the artist Daniel Nagy. As the piece has three different versions, director/choreographer/dancer Pirjo Yli-Maunula felt that the piece needs more visual expressions as well. So, during a rehearsal period in May, I set out to make poster images for the upcoming two versions of VILLA.
This is Daniel Nagy’s illustration, used for VILLA’s promotion art for it’s first version as a multidisciplinary art exhibition. Cool stuff.
Anyway! Nagy’s art was a great choice for the first poster art and I needed to come up with something that would be as interesting and would evoke a bunch of emotions in the viewer—and of course make them want to come see the piece. Hailuoto is a unique environment with constantly changing weather patterns and light conditions and it really is quite mysterious. Add in Valinen’s costumes and the general vibe of the piece created by Yli-Maunula, dancers Milla Virtanen and Titta Court, sound designer Aake Otsala and light designer Jukka Huitila, and we do have some cool shit to work with!
As is usual for any Flow production where I am involved, I tend to shoot tons of digital images. They need a lot of stuff for social media promotion and sometimes digital lends itself quite nicely to the process and the look for poster art, such as The Secret Garden from 2018. This time, though, I figured I’d bring in some FP-100C pack film and a Hasselblad medium format film camera.
We would be shooting inside the Organum, which is an acoustic installation built out of concrete and designed by Lukas Kuehle. The Organum is also used in the performance as one of the locations of action.
It’s got a certain Star Wars Tatooine vibe about it, don’t you think?
So! I set to work wanting to photograph this on Polaroid, setting up the lights, framing the shot, directing the performer etc. Now, lots of people use Polaroid as an artistic choice these days which means that you need to use your digital camera as Polaroid for your Polaroid—see the lighting, framing etc. before committing to (instant) film. The tables have turned! But, Polaroid pack film is, of course, exceedingly rare these days, which means you don’t really want to miss your shots.
Pirjo Valinen scoping out the Organum. I’m standing where the creature is in the Polaroid shot. The rooms are different sizes, creating different acoustic spaces.
Polaroid backs for medium format film cameras make for a square image. The Organum is an interesting shape with curves, vaulted ceilings and texture which changes according to the weather. We were lucky in the sense that it had rained, as the wet concrete made for a more interesting texture than if it had been dry. The FP-100C has an ASA (ISO) of 100, making it pretty slow. It’s also balanced for daylight. I did want to shoot in color because the costumes have very interesting color patterns in them, which also give them shape and depth in a two-dimensional image. With all this in mind, I got to building the lighting.
OK! The outside of the structure and the grass in front is lit by ambient, which meant dragging the shutter a little bit. This was shot in the afternoon, cloudy skies. There are three rooms in the structure: the one where the figure is standing, one to the right behind her and one to the left, also behind her. There are two flashes in the first room: key light behind the wall to camera left, pointing at the creature. Another flash behind the wall to camera right to light the wall, shape the ceiling and separate it from the darker room. Dark room has one flash pointed at a wall at low power to retain different levels of light, giving shape to the structure. The last room to camera left also has a flash pointed at a wall, lower power than key light. Three speedlights, one Profoto 600B. Key light is gridded, all the other flashes are bare.
I ended up shooting some more images on Polaroid in Hailuoto:
Top right corner is a shot of Titta Court’s character, reflected in water. Bottom left is Titta as well, and bottom right corner is Milla Virtanen. All the other shots are shot in ambient. Apparently my Polaroid back has a light leak, which you can see on the left hand side of the images (right for the reflection image, which is printed upside down). See? Instant film=instant art!
I did shoot some digital images as well and not just as Polaroids for Polaroid. We ended up using some of them in promo materials as well as behind-the-scenes stuff.
All the characters shot on Petsamo pier in Hailuoto. The character closest to camera is Pirjo Valinen standing in for Milla. Don’t tell anyone!
Titta with cloud.
The Organum ceiling is vaulted and the texture is great. Had to light the ceiling with a speedlight, another one is lighting the wool creature.
Titta shot in the evening sun.
Aake, Pirjo V., Heidi Kesti, Milla, Pirjo and Titta outside the Organum, just standing around. Art is a process!
Pirjo giving Titta direction at a base for the performance on and near Petsamo pier in Hailuoto.
Titta and Milla rehearsing. Pirjo V. keeping an eye on them.
And there we go!