Arctic
Outsider
Photography
Lapland Gothic. Dead things. Rural aesthetics & Arctic nature. Speculative fiction & Jungian stuff visualized. Memento mori & puppies. Northern Lapland based semi-hermit Sami Maununen tells visual stories through fine art photography, photomontages and multimedia essays.
Enqueries: sami.maununen@gmail.com
Instagram: @samimaununen
Sami Maununen (b. 1982) is a graphic designer, writer and self-taught photographer. After living in Helsinki for 15 years, he took a time-out and travelled a couple of years as a digital nomad around the globe, before ending up back to his roots up north. Now he is living in a remote cottage by a swamp, 300 kilometres north of the Arctic circle as a semi-hermit with his girlfriend. So basically Shrek with frozen balls and a camera.
Sami started photography in the late ’90s by shooting Lapland OG black metal bands. He discovered Photoshop in 1999 and started creating photomontages and album art. He worked briefly in commercial photography in the ’00s but quit because it involved too much social interaction.
In recent years he has been working as a freelancer in advertising and experimenting more with narrative fine art photography.
My stuff is locally sourced free-range photography made with dirt under nails. My approach to photography is narrative. My stories tend to have darker tones, but there is almost always humour present.
I mainly work with dead things. Grotesque or even unsettling at first glance, but my intention is not to shock. I’ve always felt there is tranquil beauty in memento mori images and healing humour in the macabre, like the Kutna Hora chapel or Tibetian Buddhist skull art.
I also explore sombre rural aesthetics and northern Lapland culture. My other subjects include mystic and archetypal imagery, speculative fiction and all things broken and marginal.
I alternate between dark themes, low key black and white images and frames bursting with colour and life. Maybe it mirrors the extreme Polar seasons, dark days of long winter and golden bright summer nights with the midnight sun. In order to thrive inside the Arctic Circle, you have to love darkness as much as you love light.
My processes are slow. I work on a project sometimes for years, deepening the theme like a stalagmite.
Most of the material comes from Lapland nature. I spend a lot of time in the wilderness, deconstructing the scenery and collecting interesting details and textures for my photomontages.
Photomontages can take tens of hours to create. Natural materials can create organic and unpredictable compositions but can be absolute horror to mask and post-process.
Black and white is the most natural style to me, as I started out with crappy Soviet BW-film cameras. Black and white photography reminds me of roots music, a man with a guitar. How something so simple can carry so much emotion, be endlessly versatile, and so difficult to master.
I draw inspiration from many sources. In visual arts ie. collage artists like Wilfred Sätty and mystic, visionary, psychedelic and surreal artists like Hilma af Klint, Hugo Simberg, Eleanora Carrington and Max Ernst make my heart sing. I enjoy art brut and wonky outsider stuff.
Photographers dealing with macabre subjects like Joel Peter Witkin and Roger Ballen have influenced my style. Finnish photographers I look up to are ie. Esko Männikkö and Touko Hujanen with his photojournalism pieces on rural Finland.
There are traces of speculative fiction, deep psychology, black metal, comics, the early 1900s horror movies and romantic/mystic poetry too.