Rewind the Photographs is the latest in Nina Korhonen’s photographic voyage of self-discovery. Korhonen’s previous book, the excellent ‘Anna,’ used bold color and dry humor to portray the life of Korhonen’s grandmother after she migrated to the USA from Finland.

There is little such color in Rewind the Photographs and the humor is much lower key. Instead Korhonen uses her own relationships to show the world she inhabits, a world that revolves around family and friends. We see her partner Tore, before his first radiation treatment, standing with a cross marked on his chest. Other family members appear, her mother, her father, a boy called Miko and a girl called Kati, as the rituals of family meetings are adhered to and obeyed. Sickness, death, intimacy and distance are all pointed at but never pursued.




There are camping holidays and lakeside cottages, international work trips, the homely and domestic. Throughout the book, the natural world seems to dominate; the lakes and forests of Finland, cliffs and waves on a Galician shore and the karst rock formations of China’s Guangxi Province.



Formal portraits mix with family snaps and some more conceptual constructions. Everything is loose and relaxed, a meditative but very human look at the frailty and insignificance of the lives we leave; a man standing open-mouthed with a deer flopped over his shoulder, Kati posing with a graduation cap, and Korhonen posing between the divided waters of a Finnish river. Rewind is a somewhat chaotic book, sometimes beautiful and sometimes raw. It’s a book that provides no answers, but does provide a deadpan Finnish perspective on what our lives should and should not be. —Colin Pantall