Jorma Puranen has become known for his works that arouse considerations bridging the past and the present. His subject matter spans ethnographic photography, illustrations of scholarly works, historical portraiture, and landscape painting, with points of departure often found in archives and museums. However, his approach to the archive is undisciplined - fragmentary rather than systematic. His method has also proposed fictive interpretations of his themes, the image becoming a space for readdressing a fluid past. His photographs are both of the past and the present; in Roland Barthes’ terms, ‘there and then’ becomes an experience of ‘here and now.’ In Puranen’s photographs, the reflection of light serves to mediate the images and functions as their metaphor. It often covers or blurs our access to the images, thus adding layers of uncertainty to historical objects. Reflection itself emerges as a central theme for Puranen, who appears to suggest that light is the only true reality to which the photograph has access.

Jorma Puranen (*1951 in Finland) graduated from the University of Art and Design Helsinki in 1978, where he also taught until 1998. His works have been widely exhibited in institutions such as LACMA (Los Angeles), Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogota, Nationalmuseet (Copenhagen), Kulturhuset (Stockholm), Kunsthalle Emden (DE), Central for Contemporary Art (Brussels), and Kunsthalle St. Annen (Lübeck, DE). They are represented in numerous international collections, such as those of the Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), and Finnish Museum of Photography (Helsinki). Puranen lives and works in Helsinki.