The Photography of Saida Inkeri Jäntti

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 by TheWebMistress

Tags: Inkeri, Lip Service photos, Miina Savolainen, Saida Inkeri Jäntti
Posted in Articles, Blogs, Poll and Contests, Fan Photos & Galleries |

There is little we love more than beautifully executed photography. When the artist masters the subject, composition, lighting, mood, and all the little nuanced intangibles, there’s a wonderful magic in it. This is why we occasionally shine a spotlight on emerging artists whose work we love and want to share with everyone.

You may remember Saida Inkeri’s work from our photo contests, back in the day. Her eye for a great photo stood out then, with great shots like her self-portrait in Teach Hit Me with a Ruler. Her post work in photoshop was also apparent, especially in her Summer submission. We’ve kept an eye out for her and are so glad we did. Her recent work shows a fatastic gift for visual storytelling, with exceptional beauty.

When I asked Inkeri whether she would like to be featured here, she sent me an in-depth and lovely letter about her photography, inspirations, and thoughts about the process of creativity. It really would be a crime to edit it down, so I am keeping the whole thing intact for everyone to appreciate the thought that goes into her process.

You can view more of Inkeri’s work on her pages at DeviantArt and Model Mayhem.

[Show as slideshow]

I’m from a small town in northern Finland. I’ve always wanted to work in some creative field. When I was small I wanted to be a dancer, a ballerina, and did go to ballet lessons for a while, but I guess it never took off (My sister got more into dancing and things, she’s now an aerial acrobat. I suppose the artist’s life runs in the family or something.). Later on I wanted to be a writer, a comic book artist, an actor, director, the list goes on.

I arrived at photography by accident, I guess, since I was never really that good at drawing and photography felt deceivingly easy compared to that, though it really isn’t. I photographed nature a lot at first, nature is always at hand and I just wanted something to do. Finland is a pretty good place to start, the seasons are very varied here so there’s a lot to photograph. Eventually I started liking photography more and more and went to a kind of a community college/vocational school/trade school. I graduated from there about a year ago and, now, am starting at the University of Applied Sciences, focusing on becoming a producer.

As for photography, I like symbolism a lot in mine. I like to photograph secret or surprising things that might not be immediately obvious to the casual observer. Photography is often either about showing something others might not have seen or preserving something you feel is precious to you or somebody else. Today’s digital photography has changed that a bit; you can preserve almost any moment, no matter how insignificant and it is a bit of a challenge to try to make your photograph special in that atmosphere. I’ve tried to be more subtle, not so ambitious, and just want to photograph things I feel are just pretty or nice.

Small moments.

I like details and macro shots a lot, textures like wood or peeled of paint, and have a huge love for abandoned houses, factories etc, and the same idea in nature, places where you can feel that nobody has been here for ages. It feels like time has stopped and like maybe you can sort of look into some other era. In nature, I like how it’s sort of eternal, it’s always been here and it goes on despite what people do. In abandoned houses, I’m fascinated not only by natural light and textures (which both are awesome and often unique) but also by why people left and what they left behind. Did something of them stay behind? I’d like to explore that in photos even more that I’ve done now, the feeling of peeking, almost without permission, inside somebody else’s old life.

But, then again, I’m kind of superficial. I really love fashion and clothes, so I obviously love photographing them, too. I feel there are a lot of contraries; I like the gentle, subtle, organic feel of nature, but also simply love pretty, artificial things like lace and frills and shiny things. I want to photograph people wearing lovely clothes. I chose a lot of fashion/glamour photos for this article, because I felt those would be what Lip Service Webzine readers might be interested in the most. I tried to but in some nature photography, but I don’t feel they work well in the same context. Nature has a completely different feeling.

I style my photos and my models myself and want to mix different styles, but mostly am in what you’d call gothic style. I’m kind of against considering gothic clothing as a fetish, just like I’m against considering models just being sexy or items for fantasies. I don’t think everything is about sex. I’d like to show people being beautiful and incredible without the idea that they’re just posing to be sexy. I’m very much a feminist, which might sound like a contradiction because I often like to photograph others as well as myself in revealing clothing. I just would like to challenge the idea that women are pretty just to please men or that they pose just to be objects. My ‘models’ are usually my friends or acquantainces and, while they’re all gorgeous, they’re not supermodels. And I don’t want them to be, I truly believe everybody can be beautiful and make a beautiful picture. That being said, I would like to someday work with professional models too, to see what somebody who’s trained in being in front of camera would react and how they’d work the photograph.

I also like to do self-portraits a lot. Sometimes I feel self-conscious about it, in our culture it’s considered very narcissistic to do that. I’ve always had problems with the way I look, I’ve never liked it and have considered myself to be down right ugly and disgusting. I guess self-portraits came from a place where I wanted to look pretty and grew more into this exploration of how I want to see myself. In self-potraits I can choose who I am, can control myself. Of course people seeing the picture will think what they think, but I still give them the tools. I decide what I want them to see and what I don’t. I read about a Finnish photographer called Miina Savolainen who had a project with girls from an orphanage, where she took pictures of them to focus their feelings of self-worth and love, to give them an opportunity to be photographed as who they wanted to be and not just orphans from bad homes and bad situations (Note from WebMistress: You can read about this wonderful project at THE LOVELIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD –PHOTOGRAPHY PROJECT). Her idea felt really close to how I feel about self-portraits. It’s like I can re-create myself in my own photos, be who I am or who I want to be without fearing what others think, because in the moment of taking the picture, I’m the only there. Most of them are pretty intimate and often have some kind of secrets with myself, like some things that only mean something to me.

All in all, I like hiding small things in my photos sometimes, like puzzles.

I use a lot of photoshop, which is another thing I’m often kind of torn about. I love to bring something fantastic or dreamlike to photos, something unreal. But then again, it’s very slippery slope to start fixing people and make them look unreal too. I’m definitely against creating unreal expectations of what people should look like. Of course everybody wants to look nice, everybody wants to look their best, is it okay to fix a few zits? Take out a few pounds? It’s a very thin line.

There’s still a lot I need and want to learn about photography. Maybe in the future I will focus on studying it more, or maybe find some kind of mentorship or intership somewhere that could help me out. At this point, I’m still mostly doing it because I enjoy it. One day I hope I can make it more meaningful.

~ Inkeri