Joona Möttö
Info
Artist CV
Music video directing
Photography
In 2022, I worked as a passport photographer in a photo shop to finance my artistic work. Customers would come in and out of the shop, sometimes once per minute. The photos were often taken in a hurry and the customers wanted to be anywhere but in front of the camera. But in order to take the picture, people had to surrender themselves for a brief moment of complete stillness and be inexpressive in front of the camera.
I was often surprised by the tenderness and beauty of these expressionless images. The camera seemed to reveal something that is usually buried under the surface. I would have liked to take some of the pictures with me, but in the eyes of the law, passport photography is an automated process where the photographer is considered a robot, so they have no rights to the photographs.
In this project, I was looking for the boundary between a passport photo and a portrait produced by an artist. I captured the faces of my fellow students with a large format film camera and cropped the images into the Finnish passport photo format. The process resulted in usable passport photos, some of which are now on my friends’ passports. During the printing process, I enlarge and shrink the images to different sizes to make visible the beauty that only I was able to witness in the photo shop.
Thanks to the models Ida, Jacky, Silja, Alo, Vieno, Samu, Senni and Veera, and to the test models Milja, Viivi and Santeri. Thanks to Joona Ansamaa and Mika Simola for the help with the small photo frames.