Spo's photos

Only 30 years ago the plains were full of barns. Not so anymore.

This was the first picture in her photo album. It is the only surviving part of her wedding picture – she had cut away the other side, the side that was perhaps the only thing in her life that didn't manage to turn its brightest side to her. She was a true Sunday's child: even though she had her share of grief and sorrow in her life she was always heartfelt, unpretentious and unfeigned and equally present for everyone around her, having this aura of easiness upon her; as the result people of all ages tended to like her and trust her, everything came up roses for her – except for that one thing. She was born on Sunday, too – and she passed away on Sunday. Because of her social nature she took to acting on her adult age and performed in various local amateur theatre groups; some of the productions were huge historical ones, some small like the ones she did during her last spring to entertain people in pensionates and alike. She did the latter even when she was already having these weird fits of fatigue in the early spring of 2015, eventually forcing her to sit down on the neighbourhood stairs on her way to the groceries 200 meters away. Then, in the summer of 2015 they diagnosed the reason for her weariness, acute leukemia. Doctors however said it won't neccessaily mean much these days, not even for the elderly people, so she didn't seem to be too worried about it but faithfully to her habits went confidently to her first treatment. Induction was heavy but went well, but unfortunately they found another blood disease lurking behind leukemia, the myelodysplastic syndrome: whereas leukemia was more or less defeated by the treatment, MDS all but blossomed by it, so that they had to stop the treatment short after the first induction. She called me, her firstborn, the day at the end of the summer after her doctor had told her she won't be cured. She told me over the phone she'd felt a bit sad at first, but that she hadn't "cried or anything" because she thought she'd already had a long and wonderful life, and she thought it was her time to go. When she was discharged from hospital at the end of August she was so weak and feeble that I moved in with her and lived with her for four weeks, helping her out, doing the grocery shopping, mending her food, arranging her medicine supply and the like. MDS kept her blood cell production low and she lived almost solely on imported blood, which she got weekly at two local hospitals. She was especially weak and frail prior to the transfusions, so that at home she could walk unaided only a few meters at a time, had these pangs of dizzyness and nausea and all these bruises appearing all over her body, blisters in her mouth and you name it. But she never complained; only twice she mentioned that things were not especially enjoyable any more; but she said it with no bitterness, just stated it. Luckily the summer came very late this year; after transfusions she always felt better for a few days, and on a couple of those occasions we managed to go out with a rollator to admire the flowers and the butterflies which she loved so much. I especially remember the warm and sunny day when we rolled out to the local garden to see all the azaleas and peonies, the peacock butterflies and the red admirals, stopping at the bench now and then to save her strength for the return trip. More than butterflies and flowers she loved her friends who visited her frequently, so that even though the doctors had ordered her a strict diet, she was always more concerned about having enough buns and bisquits for her friends. Her own blood cell production seemed to improve slowly but steadily during the autumn, and her overall condition with it, so eventually I decided to pack my things and head back home. My brother, her relatives and the local service took to helping her, she even managed to do the groceries by herself with her rollator. One week she sounded so bright and happy and full of stamina over the phone that I decided I won't bother her during the weekend at all; I reckoned she had to be quite exasperated to hear the same questions of mine each and every day. During that weekend her condition suddenly plummeted. Tuesday morning she managed to phone me just before I called her; she sounded dull and weak and said she had laid in her bed all weekend, alone, without eating or taking her medicine. She asked me to come back to her because she couldn't cope alone at home any more. I answered I simply couldn't because if I left, I'd go bankrupt – which was true. They hospitalized her the same day, pumped some more bags of blood into her and let her go home on Friday because she wanted it so much. The neighbors called the first ambulance for her the same evening; she had tripped over at home and couldn't get onto her feet by herself. She turned the ambulance down. The next morning two more ambulances had to be called to fetch her; the first one she again turned down, the second one she accepted, but she was already so week they had to wheel her out on a stretcher. Her sister called me and asked me to jump the train immediately. Well, I didn't: the doctor who had just examined her called me an hour later and said there was no acute crisis whatsoever, she wasn't hemorrhaging or anything. So I didn't hurry but bought the ticket for the morning train. I walked onto the platform of the Helsinki railway station at 6.50. The train wasn't there yet, and I thanked god the phone hadn't rung during the night. It rang one minute later with a nurse saying I should come over immediately; she is coughing blood and fails to respond. My train left ten minutes later, but I had 400 kilometers to go. I sat in the packed train with a cellphone in my sweating hand, and was already more than halfway through when it rang and my brother said I was already late. I walked to the solitary hall window on the second floor and stood there for the rest of the trip, staring at the fog that seemed to cover the whole country, and tried not to cry out loud. It was a train trip to remember. ... It is now 2.30 am on Monday morning. Her funeral was last Friday, she will be cremated today. For the past two weeks I've been living in her gradually emptying apartment, arranging the funerals, shifting through her papers and belongings and clearing things for the probate. Most of all I've been waiting for her to appear, even just for a few seconds so that I could offer her an apology for me not to be there during her last days, not to be there at the side of her deathbed, at the same time knowing I won't see her again, trying to adjust to living with this guilt. If you asked me I'd say she really would have deserved another kind of ending. I'm not a religious person, but perhaps God – if there indeed is one – thought that here's a person who can stand it all, a female Job if you will, so let her have it, instead of a thousand who'd only succumb to bitterness and curse their God. Despite her hard end she never faltered – and I feel so sorry for her. I feel so sorry for not being there with her, not holding her hand during her last days. ... Is there a lesson in the story? Yes, I think there is one: we should try to lead our lives so that we and any of our beloved ones could depart this world at any moment with no hard feelings on either side. At any moment.

For 15 years we’ve had an old tawny owl couple living in the nearby park, where they grow chicks more or less every year. Or at least they try to: last spring they had four chicks, but when they were three months old, a goshawk took them all in one go. Three years ago they had four chicks, goshawk took three of them, one survived to adulthood. Two years ago they had three chicks, goshawk got one of them, again only one survived. So what happened to the third – the one in the picture? Tawny owls nest in tree cavities, and when their chicks leave the nest, they either climb higher in the tree if they can, or simply drop down. At that point they already know how to fly some so that they don’t hurt themselves on landing. After that they simply climb back – not neccessarily the same tree, but to one nearby. They are terrific climbers, too, with their beaks and talons! This time their cavity was in such a place that the chicks could only jump. No-one saw them do it, but since their park is in the middle of the city, the word about the chicks spread quickly among the local photographers, who immediately stormed the site with their telephoto lenses. The most experienced ones soon noticed one of the chicks had trouble climbing back to the tree. They even kindly lifted her up there, but she had trouble staying there as if she couldn’t keep her balance. An ornitologist had ringed the chicks a few days earlier and had found out that the wing feathers of this particular kid had not grown at all. When she once again fell from the tree, the photographers called the ornitologist. I happened to be there when he arrived half an hour later with his cooler bag. He was a nice guy, a professor, with whom I’ve talked many times since. He took her to the nearby Korkeasaari Zoo Wildlife Hospital, where they treated her for three months. She fared well, learned to eat living food, in fact there was nothing wrong with her – except that her wing weathers never grew, not a bit. That meant she was and would remain flightless. Since they couldn’t release her to the wild in that state, they put her to death in the summer and did an autopsy on her. They estimated the source of her condition was a genetic disorder. I took the picture under her home tree just before the ornitologist put her in the cooler bag and took her away. (“Tawny” means the reddish brown color of the fox, the professor told me.)

Sun finally set behind the barn. In these latitudes the sun mainly moves sideways, so it took quite some time to go .

“There is a dog buried in here!” might any Finn exclaim when suspecting there is something fishy going on. The saying originates to the stone in the image, located in a park in Helsinki. There is no dog buried beneath it, however. In the first years of the 20th century Finland was autonomous grand duchy of Russia with a strong opposition towards the current imperial govern, which had stripped off many privileges granted to the duchy by the previous tsars. Current tsar, however, had granted dictatorship to local governor-general, who, fearing agitation by Finnish nationalists, had decreed acts suppressing civil rights, e.g. the prohibition of assembly. To counteract, nationalists founded a secret society called Kagal, which used to gather around this particular stone. Should a militia ask the reason for the gathering, participants had agreed to tell him they were attending a memorial, which was one of the few forms of assembly allowed. Should the militia then ask why they were gathering around an unmarked stone, they'd tell him there was a dog buried in there. A date was engraved to the stone later; it is still clearly visible, and happens to be the date Kagal was founded. Finland gained independence in 1917, two months before the civil war erupted.

Just a snapshot of another boring landscape again. Incidentally downtown Helsinki is seven kilometers in the direction of the tracks. Yes, Helsinki, the capital of Finland, the most urban hipsterious city in the world!

Instead of quoting a famous philosopher or more Nirvana here, I'll just say that I am likely to shoot my first moustache in this one. I was 17 or so. Lighting is a total accident, literally: municipal electric supply was flimsy in those days, and lights flickered every night. I have lost the negative so I scanned it from a proof I made back then. As a result there is plenty of blind black in the dark end. But it was winter and dark anyway, so it kind of fits, I guess.

I am not a religious person, so this photo is here purely for visual reasons. Besides, redemption that this event promises has caused so much misery in the world by assuring pardon for murderers, warmongers and whatnot – and I don't mean among fanatics like in islam today, but among middle-of-the-road christians – that it hardly deserves any other reason to be displayed than visual. But please don't get me wrong: we do not neccessarily need this chap in order to be cruel to each other; that can be easily seen, say, in Israel today. I shot this in Venice, but I don't remember in which church. I tried to google photos of it, but in vain. I kind of understand the lack of images, because the church was very, very dark as you can see from the specs, and the use of flash was forbidden.

She came from our building, someone I had never seen, pushed her huge bags into her tiny car and drove away. Last thing she did she slowed down under my balcony, looked out of her car window at something above my floor, and there were tears in her eyes. Or perhaps it was just the light. Shot through black curtain, and not an especially thin one either, with a 85mm lens practically touching it. Focus is in the cars, and with f/1.2 the lens has no way of focusing to the curtain, not by a mile, but still the structure of the fabric is visible.

The point near the zenith where aurora were coming from. Aurora move fast, so in order to avoid the normal blurry look and to keep the stripes visible – as well as the noise! – I used ISO 10 000. The bright stars at the top belong to the Big Dipper, whereas the grey thing at the very bottom is ice.

As photogenic as haypoles were, they are history. This I took in the end of the 70's; we had spent the night in the tent nearby but had gotten so cold before the dawn that we'd had to take a hike. Here the sun had just risen and can be vaguely seen behind the closest stack. In a thick fog in a place like this it can get so amazingly quiet at night before birds wake up that an urban dweller may go nuts out there! The fog sucks all reverberations and echos whatsoever from the ether and you can only hear your own breathing, blood circulating and brain buzzing – and the worst of all, your thoughts, if any. :-)

Air vents on BA flight from London to Helsinki had frozen shut during the flight, and my ears had almost killed me. At his point in the apron bus I could hear nothing but loud snapping in my head, so there wasn't much left for me to do but to take pictures. Year was about 1991, and I will remember the flight forever. Canon F-1 with a 20 mm lens.

Story goes that a father planted this pine-tree for his new-born child so that, in due course, it would provide planks for his/her coffin. The story does not tell why the tree was never cut down; most likely the baby died young. Infant mortality was very high in the area in those times, because the whole families, including mothers and older kids worked in the fields all day long, and infants were left home alone with their rudimentary "automated" feeding devices - that is, milk-filled cattle horns that were left hanging upside down at their reach. Those "baby bottles" were astute sources of infections. The habit of leaving children by themselves may not have been the best nourishment for their emotional developement either, and might well have contributed to the social troubles in the area those days, most notably the rise of the so called Bads , who caused havoc in the area for hundred years. The advent of the Bads is usually explained by socioeconomic reasons, like by the local inheritance rule, where one descendant got it all and forced other siblings to buy their share of the patrimony from the heir and fund the purchase by selling lumber or distilling pine tar for shipbuilding. This worked fine as long as lumber for those pursuits existed; when the forests dwindled down, non-heirs were left on empty, got frustrated – and turned into Bads. That ended when the "excess" population prone to bad habits emigrated to America – which, in turn, may explain why the US... oh well, let's not get into that! From America as well as from Russia we got this new, weird idea , which led us to our one and only civil war. The idea was called socialism . It took us 80 000 White soldiers to put an end to it, while Americans got away with one McCarthy. (Americans called it communism, but it was only because to them all Europeans are socialists, and you have to tell those two apart somehow, don't you?) In Russia the funny idea that all men are – were – equal lasted longer and provided them enough time to round it out more elegantly, without war. But let's not get into that either! Today, all that is just annoying, distant history, and all men are happily unequal again, more and more so every day – some, like immigrants, even more unequal than others. And no, we won't get into that either, because there is nothing left there to get into: our present state of affairs is the final Arcadia, Lintukoto, Paradise, Narnia, Summerland, Xanadu, Heaven, you name it – or the Tree of Life if you will; end of all roads, singularity without alternatives. . . . Sorry about all that; it must have been the limbs of the tree that carried me away – too far away someone might say – and out on a limb at that. Someone else might call it irony. Anyway, the tree in the picture goes by the name Coffin Tree in the local map, so the story might as well be true. The first story, that is.

This is my second picture ever. I took it with my first camera, Yashica TL Electro X slr. I was 13 or 14, and the horse was awfully big and I remember being afraid of it. I was also afraid of my new camera and that the horse might eat it. He didn't, not even the film, which is Kodak Plus X Pan. The sun had already set, so the slow shutter speed may explain the softness. Edit 5.4.2015: At the closer inspection of my negatives it looks like this was my second shot outdoors ; prior to this I had taken two or three indoor pictures of my little brother, probably the same day or the previous one.