The Petrified Forest

The Petrified Forest is a series of photographs that reflect Ville Lenkkeri’s memories and mental images of the little town of Mänttä in the Finnish woods, where he grew up. The photographs are staged but spring from authentic emotions and memories that connect the artist to the town, and which still cause him to call the place his hometown even decades after he moved away. Visually, the little town appears as a backdrop for the events, but rather than a document this long-term project is a personal expedition to the borderlands between fact and fiction, and to the misty woods of subjective memories.
The Petrified Forest is a project that deals not only with subjective memories of childhood in an industrial small town, but also with the structure of truth and nature of representation.

The series was published 2016 in the book The Petrified Forest by Kerber Verlag.