Artists come and go from my sphere of inspiration. I’m not sure what variables allow an artist to stay on my scope, but Elina Brotherus has all of those.

I was first exposed to her work a year ago in an advanced photography class I was taking. Her famous image Der Wanderer (above) was present in a chapter outlining contemporary landscape imagery. It was interesting at first to see how an obscured figure, back to the viewer, created a collection of requirements necessary to be deemed “good” contemporary photography. If there is one thing that my photography studies has entailed, it is the quest for identity and how we identify ourselves and the world that is defined as the “contemporary war.” With the identity expectation in hand, Brotherus piqued my interest in that she combines her formal painting training into her photography.

Enter Brotherus’ New Painting Series. From a description of her work on her website, where the images of the series can also be viewed, she states that she brings new life to her painting skills by photographing. In a later statement, she denotes her body of work as:

Like in my earlier work, I frequently use myself as a model. However, these new works escape from the inherent problem of self-portraiture, the problem of «representing oneself». They do not aim at drawing a psychological portrait of the subject, but rather presenting him/her as an object of investigation, not for the inner properties but for the external ones.

With all the changes in my life at the current moment, I am left appreciating how small she makes herself in her landscape images. Instead of her against the world, its the world against her.