Valokuvaaja Pekka Järveläinen poimii ulottuvillamme olevasta näkymästä kuvallisesti oleellisen sekä yhdistää siihen kauneuden ja herkkyyden oivaltavasti.

Ajatusten tiiveys,
tähtäämisen tarkkuus,
tavanomaisen kauneus,
kuten se oli jo kauan sitten,
on nyt ja aina
Pekka Järveläisen
harvinaislaatuisissa näkymissä.

Lainaus Arno Rafael Minkkisen esseestä ”The Archer and the Teacher”

Pekka Järveläinen on valmistunut TaiKin kuvallisen viestinnän laitokselta 1975 pääaineenaan valokuvaus. Hän on työskennellyt useille aikakauslehdille mm. Yhtyneissä Kuvalehdissä ja Sanoma Magazines Finland Oy:ssä.

THE ARCHER AND THE TEACHER

Cristina and I are engaged in matters life and death, philosophical improbabilities no doubt, in the small garden at the southern outskirts of the Castello Fortezza in Montalcino. She is one of my students at the Toscana Photographic Workshops held in that summer of 2008 in the famous convent of Sant’ Anna in Camprena where the English Patient rolled out its sad and tearful saga of love and misadventure. Cristina’s eyes are amazingly bright I tell myself. Well, she is a photographer, a good one, and thus vision and aim is everything as we discover simultaneously when a nine year-old princess, Ms. Robin Hood herself, steps into a sunny spotlight out of nowhere, pulls back a bow, and launches a puny little arrow that barely flies an inch. “Hooray!” we can almost hear her exclaim. The little girl dressed in a jumper and pigtails runs to fetch the blunted projectile, sets up for another shot, and fires away. “Hooray!” Two
shots more and she’s gone, never to be seen again until back on the critique wall of the classroom in the convent she reemerges racing with the bow and arrow just purchased from a Pinocchio shop no doubt, flying straight across the Castello
doorway in a photograph by Pekka Järveläinen. “Hooray!”

So, let’s let the arrow fly back some thirty years. Where am I? Well, I have just become a teacher.
I am in Finland. I am in Helsinki. I am at the Taideteollinen Korkeakoulu in the Mikonkatu Studio near Esplanadinkatu, the third floor photography lab outpost of Ateneum to be exact. Not knowing what one must do to teach photography I turn to the photographs on the critique walls to instruct me. I look for images that surely grabbed the attention of the student the moment the images
entered his or her viewfinder. What made the student press the button, I asked myself?

Looking around the walls of this exhibition, the answer presents itself immediately. The world comes together. The little Robin Hood’s clutch of bow and arrow matches up perfectly with the chain of the castle moat door, the tilt of the frame accelerates her
delirious momentum to find her own Sherwood Forest, the framing holds everything tightly in its grasp much like the weaponry held fast in her hot little fist, everything that matters is there and nothing more. Such economy of vision, such precision of
purpose, such beauty in the ordinary, as it was then so long ago and as it is now, as ever, in the extraordinary vision of Pekka Järveläinen.
“Hooray!”

Arno Rafael Minkkinen
Fosters Pond, April 2010