Sanna Kannisto

Kannisto made her first visit with scientists to the Amazon rainforest during her photographic studies at Turku University of Applied Sciences. Ultimately, she made eight trips to rainforests and traveled to Brazil, Costa Rica and French Guiana, remaining for two to three months at a time while staying in scientific field stations and photographing near the scientists. Her photographs from that period are collected in her first book, Fieldwork. “Still Lifes,” the first of three series in the book, features photographs shot inside a portable studio. Kannisto built the small studio of white Plexiglas that could be lit with small flashlights on the outside and a front wall of netting where the animals could be placed into and released from the studio. Using laboratory stands, clamps and other technical items, she mounted branches to serve as perches for the birds, snakes and other animals that she photographed in the miniature studio. (She worked quickly, and then returned the animals to their original location.) Black drapes that were hung on both sides of the space add a sense of theatricality to the images. The drapes are also a reminder that the photographs are staged to create contemporary art and that the photographs are not intended to be contemporary versions of the 19th-century, natural-history illustrations that they suggest.

All of the photographs in Observing Eye must have been shot in Kannisto’s small, portable studio, but most of the photographs in the book depict only the bird(s) and the branches they are perched on against a pale gray background that functions as a negative space. The context of the studio with its drapes as well as the lab stands and vintage Bunsen burner branch supports have been cropped out of the images. All that remains of contemporary identifiers are the rings attached to each bird’s leg. (These small rings of plastic with their individual numbers allow the researchers Kannisto has been working with in the rainforests and in Europe to track the birds’ migratory patterns.) Depicting the birds in isolation brings the imagery closer to the scientific and art-historical traditions of illustrations from the 16th century to the present. Yet the series suggests more than illustration. As Sophie Wright says: “[It is] a dance between art and science, information and enigma. The intimate glance exchanged between observed and observer becomes all the more poignant in the context of our current ecological crisis.”

Sanna Kannisto was born in Hämeenlinna, Finland, and has said that her childhood experiences outdoors led to her interest in photographing nature. As a girl, she would collect flowers and insects, pick berries and go fishing during the summers and holidays when her family stayed at a cottage near a forest. But her family was not interested in art, museums or culture, so her first real exposure to imagery came via foreign music magazines and MTV, which arrived in Finland when she was 13. Attending Turku University of Applied Sciences (1994 to 1997) provided Kannisto with an opportunity to travel with scientists to the Amazon rainforests where she began photographing some of the images in her first book, Fieldwork. She received her Master’s degree in 2002 from the University of Art and Design Helsinki (now the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture), the noted home of the Helsinki School. Kannisto is one of the second generation of graduates of the Helsinki School, known for advancing the international visibility of Finnish photography, its students and its graduates.

Sanna Kannisto is a Finnish photographer (born 1974) who is noted for her photographs taken in rainforests and for her studio photographs of birds.