Documentary and portrait photographer

From a very young age, I was drawn to stories and to telling them. At some point in my youth, I understood that the pictures I was looking for were already there in the world, waiting to be found and framed. I had been making images since childhood with a 35 mm camera, a cine camera, and later a video camera.

What drew me to documentary work came early. As a child, I spent time with two kinds of pictures: the books at home showing other parts of the world, and photographs from the Vietnam War and later other crises. I didn't understand much of the context at that age, but enough to know that something there mattered. Decades later, I completed the photojournalism course at the New York Institute of Photography.

I am a documentary and portrait photographer based near Helsinki, working in Finland and internationally. My work moves between two kinds of subject — the people I photograph in the studio, often returning to the same person three or four times over the years, and the places where slow time still happens: the houses of the Norwegian Arctic, the working coasts of southern Europe, the pétanque courts and card tables of the long afternoon. The same question runs through everything: what comes through when nothing is being performed?

In the studio, I take time to shape the light; on location, I work primarily in available light, adding more when an image needs it. Frames build slowly. The aim isn’t a striking image; it’s an honest one.

Selected publications and recognition

The Photographic Museum of Humanity's Familiar Stranger. Order the book here.

Other features: Vogue Italy, LFI Master Shot Gallery, Photo Vogue, LHSA, Volta ao Mundo (Portugal).

You can read my experiences with the APO-Summicron-M 50 mm ASPH “LHSA” edition here.

Commissions

Available for editorial and environmental portraits, corporate portraits, and documentary commissions in Finland and abroad.

juha@juhawikstrom.com · Instagram: @juhawikstrom