Who's in town?
Arja Hyytiäinen

SALT Galata, Workshop II-III

Finnish photographer Arja Hyytiäinen will talk on the first day of a 5-day photography workshop she’ll be conducting at SALT Galata within the framework of a recent initiation by SALT and Geniş Açı Project Office to host a series of photography events throughout 2015.

Hyytiäinen is well known for her photographic practice; a mixture of fiction, autobiography and philosophical musings. She has made a name for herself as a contemporary street photographer, with a subjective, cinematographic style. She sums up the topic of her talk as follows: “I can only speak about my own experiences in life which I have at some point decided to record in mainly photographic means, keeping a sort of archive or trace. Often a small chapter of life, a period of which one understands only afterwards, becomes something slightly different in photographs, a change that is partly intentional due to the passage of time.. It is a form of collecting and editing, a recomposing of events in photographs with the help of forgetting and adding, a process that becomes obsessional at some point.”

The Personal Storytelling: Photography Workshop with Arja Hyytiäinen takes place between May 16-20 with 12 participants selected by application from Russia, Armenia, Greece, Israel, Iran, Spain, Germany and Turkey. Workshop participants will each focus on a personal theme and their final work will be publicly presented at SALT Galata at the conclusion of the workshop.

The talk will be held in English.


Arja Hyytiäinen

Born 1974 in Turku. Lives in La Rochelle. Arja Hyytiäinen started photographing in a documentary style, beginning her education in Northern Sweden and later on graduating from FAMU in Prague. Living a life between several European cities - Berlin, Paris, Prague, Gothenburg - Hyytiäinen has been documenting her own life in movement, combining it with fiction. She won the Kodak Prize for Critical Photography in France in 2006, and the Grand Prix at Lodz Fotofestiwal 2007. She was elected for the European Photo Exhibition Award 2013. Her book Distance Now came out in 2007 and Cahiers in 2012. She has been freelancing and exhibiting in several European countries. In recent years, Hyytiäinen has taught workshops at Neue Schule Fur Fotografie in Berlin, FotoDepartment in St. Petersburg, and at various other schools. Hyytiäinen is represented by Agence VU in Paris and Galeria ZPAF i S-KA in Cracow.