Aapo Huhta is an artist photographer working in Helsinki. He graduated as Master of Fine Arts from Aalto University in 2015. Huhta focuses on experimental documentarism. The art of books of photography and related experiments with different methods and narratives are important aspects of his works. Huhta has published two books of photographs, Block (Kehrer Verlag, 2015) and Omatandangole (Kehrer Verlag, 2019) and has held solo exhibitions in Finland, Germany and Sweden. Aapo Huhta is the 36th Young Artist of the Year.
’I photographed the works for my first two books in New York and in the desert of Namibia. The themes on which I work are not completely clear to me when I start. This vagueness is one is of the things that I enjoy most in photography — it leads me beyond my own imagination. It is necessary to lose my way. I find the greatest satisfaction if I finally find my way, if I myself learn to understand what my photographs are ultimately about. That is when the piece is finished, having formed itself as it were.
I often find myself creating photographs in which familiar things become unfamiliar, the everyday becomes unreal, or things just look strange. In my photographs, man is often lost. Even though everything around us is chaotic and disintegrating, it is possible to discover and make photographs that show it all as perfect and pristine, completely different from what reality seems to be. Maybe the perfect moment captured by the camera was after all true for an instant — like unattainable bliss, which always disappears as fast as it has appeared.’
