Poromaa

I have rebuilt my website and moved it to www.poromaa.net Welcome in for a visit

I have spent the last few months doing a real deep dive among the material I have collected over the past five years. I have sorted, thrown away and found a lot of unprocessed material. An exciting inventory that has resulted in several new pictures, but also several book projects. Three books are now complete, and I thought I would present them to you.

Office Part of my “urbex-adventure”, this time it is all about office interiors 30X30 cm/20 pages with 20 high-res photos. Matte paper with Lay Flat technique.

2020 I remember that the last thing I did in 2019 was to travel the subway and take photos. My friend Malin and I had just started a joint project where the Stockholm metro would be at the center of a book project. I remember that we devoted so much energy to this, partly on our own, partly with joint tours and interesting discussions about ideas and aesthetics, about finding that situation when our completely different orientations as artists could nurture each other. But then the pandemic struck, and everything had to be put aside. In a relentless moment, everything stopped. In my mind, photography is first and foremost about exploring, about being able to move freely in both thought and feeling through the urban landscape, it is about looking for that which arouses the desire within oneself, the desire to tell, describe, transform, use and develop something that hopefully also evokes something in a viewer. But as I said, the pandemic put an end to this and in 2020 I hardly took a single photograph. But I did other things, I returned to my roots as a painter, I tried to find a way to use that experience in combination with other experiences I have accumulated over the years, with the digital toolset, with photography, with the feel of painting. And part of this effort is represented in this book. The images are emotional repercussions in how I experienced the year of 2020. 28x28 cm/26 pages and 25 high-resolution mixed media images – Matte photographic paper with Lay Flat technique.

Xplore - Chapter 1 This book project is not about abandoned places; it is not about urbex or urbanexploration. Well, yes, it is about exploration, of course, but isn’t that the fundamental basic of art; to explore, whether it is about exploring ideas or emotions or the concept of reality?

​Urbex as a genre within photography seems to be about the places as a self-contained idea; it seems to be all about documenting these places and presenting them straight upto the world, saying: “I have been here”, without any real or obvious idea of why that is so important to tell, other than the sport of it; to be first on site, preferably the one and only. Well, I have never been particularly interested in sports, nor to be the one and only, and I am certainly not interested in being the first on site (that would be a contradiction to my basic idea as an artist). So, I do what I always do; I explore, for the thrill of it; I walk the beat, but I always try to use my explorations to make art, and I do think that art is the way, regardless of where my camera is aiming, continuing to focus on why not where.

So, this book is about abandonment as an idea, not the abandoned places. It is about what we leave behind. It is about life in retrospect, about remembrance and how this affects me and hopefully you emotionally. I feel that human life or our activities as humans never is as clear as when we are ruled out and the focus is set on the traces we leave behind. This is what I try to convey; a sense of life in emptiness, an afterlife, or life after, if you will. 28x28 cm/26 pages and 25 high-resolution photos – Matte photographic paper with Lay Flat technique.

© 2021 by Samuel Poromaa