Erkki Raskinen:
From my long career as a photojournalist, I have gathered for this thirteenth solo exhibition some surprising situations that I have managed to capture with my camera. The first pictures are from the 1960's. Often the situation has come at lightning speed and sometimes it has required hours of waiting in sleet, wind or scorching heat. The best moments are those when you know you have captured that “something” in a photo. Situations do not repeat themselves.
One of the most amazing “You never know” situations occurred on a work trip to Tallinn in June 1988. The purpose of the trip with journalist Timo Haapala was to compile a reportage on the robberies targeting Finnish tourists. While we were compiling the story in the center of Tallinn, a man came to talk to us. When we told him we were journalists, he got excited and told us about the upcoming night’s event on the "singing stage". The man and his friends picked us up from the hotel in his car and so we were the only foreign journalists to witness the singing revolution with 70,000 Estonians.
The exhibition begins with a small photo compilation of this event. The flag photo “The Freedom High” was chosen as the news photo of the year and the press photo of the year in Finland in 1988. The photo was taken early in the morning, when the people were leaving the singing stage for their homes. I was photographing the flowers on the stage when a group of boys got on stage and started waving the Estonian flag. I managed to take five pictures when the boys jumped away in fear of the police.
The images in this exhibition were shot on film, except for the last two images in the exhibition. They were taken with a smartphone camera. Most of the black and white images in the exhibition were made by me myself using the old method in a darkroom.
Erkki Raskinen (b.1947) has been a freelance journalist and photographer living in Tampere since 1965. In 1972-73, he was a photographer for the Finnish UN battalion in Cyprus and Egypt. In 1975–2008, he was a newspaper photographer at Sanoma Oy (Helsingin Sanomat and Ilta-Sanomat). Retired since 2008.
