The series Witnesses of the Others explores my own family background by appropriating historical photographs from 1870s–1960s with family album photographs. I combined old photographs to the present time by painting on them. The paint emphasizes a certain pose, a facial expression, a hand in a lace glove or an accidental passer-by and simultaniously creates a play with the recognizability in photography as a media and the abstraction of the painted surface.

Many of the historical photographs are taken by famous photographers Viktor Barsokevitsch (1863–1933) and Karl Granit (1857–1894) who both were working in my hometown, in Kuopio. The original photographs can be found in the archives of the Kuopio Museum of Cultural History. The other part of old photographs are from my own family albums. These photograps were taken in many different locations in Helsinki, Viborg, Vienna, Berlin, Kuopio e.a. where my great grandparents and grand parents were living, studying or travelling. My grandfather, who appears in some of these pictures both as a child and an adult, after retiring from military career acted as a portrait photographer in Rautalampi and Kuopio.

In the pictures I examine the thoughts and emotions aroused by the photographs as well as any existing historical facts about the people or events featured in them. Although the attention is drawn to lights and shadows in the photos, my primary concern are the emotions awakened in by the pictures in which completely unrelated events and persons are mixed together to create a new narrative or story. This is a story about war, separation, death, adoption, orphans and adopted children, teenage mothers who must abandon their children, maids and patients, attempting suicides, bombings, fires, studies in Vienna and Berlin in the early years of the 20th century, immigrants heading to America, affluence and poverty, accidental meetings and missed encounters. The experiences are passed on from one generation to the next in the form of fragments of stories, unvoiced traumas or golden memories. Similarities between events and opportunities for identification are addressed by my personal perspective.

In time, the private becomes universal, and allows documentary materials to be approached conceptually. The appropriation of images makes tangible the dimension between the past and the present.