Sacred Places

A Journey Among the Tourist Scenes

Tourist attractions are sites of pilgrimage for the Western world, visual-ecumenical raw material for tourism, the fastest growing industry in the world today. Juha Suonpää has seized the topical issue using photography, video and writing. A tourist among other tourists, he has photographed and videoed archetypal tourist sights and observed the behaviour of people who visit them.
A book called Sacred Places is published in conjunction with the project. The book is photographed and written by Juha Suonpää and published by the Maahenki publishing company.

Sacred Places continues the line of visual cultural research familiar from Juha Suonpää's earlier projects. This time the author has turned his critical gaze upon touristic practices and the visual consumption of sights. Suonpää depicts the reverse side of tourism, its brutal commercialism and deep impacts on the environment, but also the romantic expectations, sentimentality and often unwittingly comic side of tourism. Tourists are drawn to nature that has been turned into a sight-seeing attraction, and nearly every one of them wants to use a camera to make a record of their visit to the site. By the act of taking a photo, the tourist attraction is sacralised and the tourist's experience is ritualised, using as models picture postcards and travel brochures.

In Juha Suonpää's photographs and videos, the gathering of tourists at a sight turns into a kind of scripted play, where the radical, religious, idealistic and ethical dissimilarity of people coming from different worlds is transformed into a collective experience. Tourist attractions have become contractual arenas mainly peopled by tourists themselves, a prime example being Nordkapp on the shore of the Arctic Ocean.

Juha Suonpää is in the very spearhead of Finnish photography. He is a photographer and a scholar (Doctor of Art, University of Art and Design Helsinki 2002), known for his studies and publications analysing nature photography, such as The Beastly Image of the Beast in 2002. Suonpää works as the principal lecturer in visual culture in the Tampere Polytechnic.

More information:
Juha Suonpää, photographer, tel. 0400-120 544; juha.suonpaa@tamk.fi