There are two images in this book of century-old photographs of Helsinki, Signe Brander 1869-1942. Helsingin valokuvaaja ('Signe Brander 1869-1942. Photographer of Helsinki') that I never tire of looking at. One is a view of Iso Roobertinkatu street, where, in the 19th century, inhabited Helsinki still ended - to the south began cliffs, ropeworks and tanneries. On either side of the street shabby single- or two-storey buildings are visible, but at the end looms one of the handsome neo-renaissnace buildings which, in the 1880s, presaged Helsinki's growth into a city. The street is surfaced with round cobblestones, and the tramrails that led from Fredrikinkatu street to the then town centre curve across the foreground. There is not a single vehicle to be seen in the street, just a couple of pedestrians and a dog picking its way between the tramrails.
     The photograph is taken in the rich light of afternoon, and the shadow of a large building falls unmistakably across the street. With its help I could, even today, estimate the time when Signe Brander took her photograph, back in 1907, simply by looking out of my window: the building is the one I live in. The five-storey building, designed by Hermann Gesellius and Eliel Saarinen, had been completed the same year.
     Another photograph, also from 1907, shows a northward view from Fredrikinkatu street. The composition is dominated by two massive blocks of flats built in the Finnish national romantic style on either side of the street, and farther off more of these monuments to rapid growth and increasing prosperity are emerging from their scaffolding. In the foreground a couple of the wooden houses, surrounded by garden trees, typical of the empire-style Helsinki built in the 1820s remain, but their time is already up. In the astonishing depth of field of the photograph, the street looks as if it ends in mid air, in the misty light of Kamppi square. Its disappearance in the face of densely built, huge business blocks is now being witnessed by Helsinki citizens of a much newer vintage.
     In the three last decades of the 19th ccentury, Helsinki's population had trebled, reaching one hundred thousand in 1902. Habitation spread to new parts of the stony peninsula, but also grew upward on old sites. The old Helsinki of wooden buildings began to disappear.
     Helsinki's Ancient Monuments Board made the decision to record the vanishing vistas of the centre and suburbs for the City Museum, and employed the 37-year-old Signe Brander, the owner of a Helsinki photographic studio named Helikon, for the task. Between 1907 and 1913 Miss Brander took more than 900 catalogued photographs over the entire area of the then Helsinki.
     The photography sessions were carefully prepared. The members of the Ancient Monuments Board organised excursions to familiarise themselves with the buildings that were to be photographed, and the photographer used the same hackney carriage to transport herself and her photographic equipment - a sturdy camera and stand, photographic cassettes and kilo upon kilo of light-sensitive glass plates. Even the camera was large and heavy, but because its adjustable front and back plates, which could be used to adjust perspective, it was excellently suited to architecture.
     The photographic material limited the documentary photography, but at the same time offered a possibility. Leafing through Brander's Helsinki images, one notes that the overwhelming majority of them were taken in summer, around midday, and in a south-north direction with the light, allowing the end result to remain unaffected by slight movement. Nevertheless, Brander was also daring enough to set out with her equipment in winter, as her grey and motionless shore views of industrial Helsinki's factories and workshops demonstrate.
     Brander's subject was not merely architecture - she was also required to record the life of the streets and courtyards, markets, even celebratory decorations. She often persuaded curious onlookers to feature in her photographs. Sometimes upstanding Helsinki citizens appear looking, relaxed and self-possessed, straight into the camera, as if they knew they were entering the historical record. Sometimes they are concentrating on their work - washing mats on a laundry jetty, for example, or cleaning the shade of a gas-lamp or braving the crowds at a herring market.
     Signe Brander's fate was a shocking one. After the Helsinki project she undertook the systematic photography of, among other subjects, the manor houses of Finland, until glaucoma and other ailments undermined her health. She was cared for in a Helsinki general hospital whose patients, because of the bombing of the Second World War, were evacuated to a psychiatric hospital close to the city. The death of its more than one hundred patients from malnourishment and vitamin depletion in the winter of 1942 is one of the darkest chapters of Finland's wartime history. Signe Brander was one of the victims, and she was buried with the others in a mass grave.


Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Photographs from Signe Brander 1869-1942. Helsingin valokuvaaja [Signe Brander 1869-1942. Photographer of Helsinki. Edited by Jan Alanco and Riitta Pakarinen. Helsinki: Helsinki City Museum, 2004.]