“The world is wondering where Malaysian Airline Flight 370 disappeared.”
“The girls saved a snail from the edge of the road to a nearby grass.”
“Jetlagged and I am looking for a nice cafe. A 450 kg bomb exploded in a Baghdad hotel.”
Since 2001, Finnish artist Jari Silomäki has taken a daily landscape photograph with a short caption of text attached. The photos range from a man standing by a river to a cow in the middle of a cemetery, and each photo is completely unstaged. Over the years, he has amassed thousands of photos which unfolded in his exhibition, “My Weather Diary”.
The exhibition opened Feb. 7 at the FAR Center for Contemporary Arts at 202 S. Rogers St. The gallery is open for viewing 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. every Tuesday through Saturday until March 29.
Lisa Woodward, co-curator of the FAR Center, met Silomäki in France.
“We were just really taken with this project. Yari had, like, 500 images for us to look through, and that was edited down,” Woodward said. “We really got to dig in and sort through all these pictures to see which ones we felt would really speak to people right now from the past 20 years.”
At the exhibition Friday, attendees slowly trickled in, taking in each photograph that lined the white gallery walls. David Ondrik, a photography lecturer at IU, was one of the first people to visit the exhibition.
“I think this is diary-like work, and sometimes I don’t like that as much, but they all seem very well done,” Ondrik said. “I think they’re curious and engaging enough that it works pretty well.”
Visitors paused between each photo, leaning in to read the white cursive lettering at the base of the pictures. Some captions directly related to the photo, while others were seemingly random. The only discernible connection between all the captions and the photos was that the events inspiring both occurred on the same day. Oftentimes, a beautiful photo was paired with a more serious caption, like Silomäki’s first photo for the project taken in 2001.
The photo was of a lakeside landscape from his parents' summer cottage. In an email to the IDS, Silomäki recounted the moment that “My Weather Diary” began. A day after, he heard that a relative and neighbor of the cottage had passed away.
“When I developed the film and printed the photograph of the lakeside landscape, I noticed that it appeared dark and tense,” he said in the email. “I wrote on the image: ‘our summer cabin the day that Jouko died.’”
Over two decades later, Silomäki still carries a camera with him everywhere, snapping shots of his everyday life. He said a core principle of “My Weather Diary” was that he never sought out subjects or assigned value to what he captured.
“I have taken pictures on my way to the store, to visit friends, to work, or wherever I happened to be,” Silomäki said. “I named the work ‘My Weather Diary’ because I knew that all the elements in it would change and repeat like the weather, including personal events that repeat themselves, as well as politics and social events that cycle like the weather.”
For Silomäki, the project represents pure, classical documentary photography. The photos are simple and authentic, only capturing what Silomäki sees in his everyday life.
“Time is what, in my view, has made these images interesting to me,” Silomäki said. “I have looked out of the same window for more than twenty years, observing the same landscape, yet seeing it differently as the world has changed—and as I have changed.”
