Published by Hatje Cantz. Edited by Nadine Barth. Text by Mark Gisbourne.
The latest photographic series from Finnish photographer Ola Kolehmainen (born 1964) documents mosques, synagogues, churches and cathedrals around Europe—some accessible only to a few, while others are visited by thousands of visitors and worshippers every week.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Text by David Elliott, Alistair Hicks, Arja Miller, Timothy Persons.
Ola Kolehmainen's photographs are extraordinarily minimal and almost exclusively depict sections of building façades. The Minimalist austerity of these images is occasionally broken by elements that circumvent this formalism--trees or houses mirrored in the facades.
Helsinki School photographer Ola Kolehmainen's work centers on the basic structures of contemporary architecture, and the series of strict geometric forms that characterize them--he photographs the grids of curtain glass facades as both Minimalist compositions and canvases for the altered landscapes that they reflect back to the world. In creating these nearly abstract images he describes himself as eliminating "visual noise," yet Kolehmainen remains welcoming to the elements that undermine the cleanest view--he lets tree branches wave into the frame, or puffy white clouds break chaotically over the sky-blue squares of a façade. Kolehmainen was born in 1964 and studied at the University of Arts and Design, Helsinki; Fraction Abstraction Recreation collects his unpublished works of the past two years.
Ola Kolehmainen: A Building Is Not a Building
Ola Kolehmainen: Fraction Abstraction Recreation