Jari Salo is a photographer based in Helsinki, Finland.
His work deals with psychological and societal matters, such as abondonment, attachment and interrelational connections. His methods draw from subjective and symbolic photography, where themes originating from personal experiences and reflecting inner worlds are transferred to the universal level of archetypes, motifs and emotions.
Project statement: Monolith
Monolith is a work about abondonment, attachment and personal identity.
It explores the changes in perception and interpretations of memories of childhood relationships, and how they shape adulthood identity.
The method of the project is a combination of anthropomorphic landscape photography, psychogeography, self-portrait and personal archival material, with which it studies the themes of rejection, absence, blame and forgiveness.
The project’s autobiographical starting point is my own relationship with my father, which ended in my parents’ divorce when I was four years old. My father was not physically present in my life after that, but the impact of that short relationship has been significant in my later life.
In Monolith I try to disintegrate and deconstruct my perception of my relationship with my father, allowing for an opportunity to reinterpret and redefine meaning and emotions I’ve attached to it. Through deconstruction comes the possibility of reconstruction.
