Hannu Marttila compares and contrasts the work of two
  veteran press photographers, Martti Brandt and Hans Paul

 
Both Martti Brandt and Hans Paul belong to the generation of photographers who learned their trade on the streets, with their newspaper's cheaper camera in their hands, and sometimes found themselves asking advice from even a friendly photographic shop. Their long careers have, however, not made the photographers similar: Brandt has worked – mainly as a documentary photographer, Paul as a newspaper news photographer.
     One would like to believe that the instrument forms the photographer, as it does the narrative of a working journalist. If one can speak of tempo in connection with photographs, Brandt's pictures are often characterised by a kind of epic slowness. The viewer must give them time to open and reveal their emotional charge. In Hans Paul's images, on the other hand, it often feels as if a whole long chain of events has been halted at the essential moment; they apprehend the speed and lightness of the paces of history, even when they feel too slow.
     In an interview with his colleague Seppo Saves, Martti Brandt tells of his lifelong fear of public appearance – he prefers to tell his story in pictures. To judge by the photographs, he approaches his subjects bravely and openly, and gets them to open up.
     Hans Paul is known as a controversial photographer who has publicly pondered issues from the ethics of press photography – particularly the debate about paparazzi and the protection of privacy sparked by the death of Princess Diana – to the problems of modern image-processing. From Paul's pictures, one could conclude that, more often than Brandt, he avoids direct eye contact; he photographs his subjects often even from behind, as if emphasising in them the objectivity of news rather than the subject.




Martti Brandt: dance of the seven veils, Lieksa market, 1973

Martti Brandt's series of photographs of a striptease dancer at a market in a small town in eastern Finland belongs to the golden age of Finnish periodical documentary. I use the word 'humour' with some reservations, but of course there is always humour that is not meant to be funny. The audience's fur caps and shell-suit tops are in grotesque contrast to the poor girl's shivering nakedness. It can hardly have inflamed the audience either.
     One can of course ask whether the sex industry in all its forms only gets reporters on the move when it moves out of the restaurant-filled streets of Helsinki and into the 'unspoiled' rural markets of the countryside and its remote motels, as has happened with the economic recession of the 1990s and the opening up of Russia.

Martti Brandt: Salvation Army sister Leena, 1966

In the end, everything is simple. The white apron concentrates the light on Sister Leena as she sits among the old ladies in their black clothes. But how has Brandt captured on her face this particular expression, which contains more questioning and wonderment than ready truths and hymn-singing?




Martti Brandt: the old centre of Rauma, 1965

Is the subject the town or the boy? Courtyards of wooden houses have been central to the urban culture of the Nordic countries, but in many towns they were mercilessly demolished. The old wooden centre of Rauma, which was founded in the middle ages, is alive in Brandt's photograph, as it continues to be alive almost forty years later. Religiously restored, it is on Unesco's world heritage list.
    The puddle beautifully reflects the facade of the neighbouring building, but the world of the interior courtyard can only be guessed at. The cycling boy flashes into and out of the picture like the generations before him and after. Life does not stop to pose. The balancing dog demonstrates that difficult things must sometimes be done in the name of friendship.

Martti Brandt: Urho Kekkonen and the logger, 1962

President Urho Kekkonen (1900–1986) tried consciously to create an image of himself as the father of the country, who got along well with ordinary people, but he also knew how to charm representatives of the young intelligentsia. The tactic is age-old: the people must be kept content and competitors afraid.
    The snowy forest and the relaxed but gentlemanly outdoor clothes were part of the deal when Kekkonen went among the people. The delicately intimate composition emphasises the unforced relaxedness of the conversation between the logger and the president. Brandt has not tried to conceal Kekkonen's charisma, but neither has he had to work hard to find it.

Hans Paul: visit of the Polish fleet, Helsinki, 1968

Naval visits and girls were, at least for the Helsinki newspapers of the 1960s, the same kind of recurrent theme as the first heatwave of summer and the ice-cream stalls. Helsinki was still a remote city that favoured homogeneity, so that a ship from socialist Poland marked a breath of fresh air from the wide – or at least a different – world.
    The rhythm of the three female bodies makes Hans Paul's photograph a classic of its subject. The white sailors' caps are the dot on the i – are the Polish Romeos just holding on to them, or are they using them to hide their faces from the camera?

Hans Paul: the media at work in parliament, 2000

The best news photographs are often the result of a kind of sidelong glance – when the photographer turns his camera in a different direction from everyone else.
    A solitary moment in the parliament cafeteria spend by the then prime minister, the social democrat Paavo Lipponen, currently the speaker of parliament, looks hurried and grumpy. The photograph does not perhaps tell the whole truth about Lipponen, but it certainly has something to say about the working of the media.

Martti Brandt: Anna Verouli, 1982

Hans Paul: Florence Griffith-Joyner, 1988

When a weekly publication appears, the ordinary news pictures have already been seen in the daily newspapers, Martti Brandt complains in his interview with Seppo Saves. The Greek javelin-thrower Anna Verouli's victory dance before a home crowd at the European Athletics Championship in 1982 tells more of her power and dedication than the images of the winning performance itself – pictures of javelin throwers, for some reason, generally look static.
    Verouli's brutal power and fury were doubtless effective in dealing with her fellow competitors as they waited their turn. What kind of psychological weapon were the famous nails of the three-times gold medallist at the Seoul Olympics, the sprinter Florence Griffith-Joyner? From the point of view of running and the practical life of a woman, they were a useless addition, but in preparing for the start they communicated the same arrogance as a glinting stiletto in a dark alley. Hans Paul crops the winner's portrait down to the essentials: a few well-honed muscles, a suit that emphasises her body by revealing it as it conceals – and those nails.

Hans Paul: Sinebrychoff Park, Helsinki, 1997

Hanging branches neatly frame the view of a popular park in central Helsinki, which the brewing family of Sinebrychoff, originally from Russia, founded in the early 19th century close to their house and brewery. The wealthy Paul and Fanny Sinebrychoff were collectors and patrons of art, and in the 1920s they presented their home, at the edge of the park, and its art treasures to the city of Helsinki. It is now a museum.
    The park has always been open to the public, and at weekends in the winter, in particular, its slopes are used by dozens of tobogganers of various ages. Perhaps it is the spirit of the place inspired Hans Paul to make reference to the winter atmosphere and sparing light of old Dutch paintings.

Hans Paul: church altar in the town of Suez after
the Yom Kippur war, 1974

During the course of his career, Hans Paul has photographed the world's crisis points and seen the traces of mass murders and catastrophes. The mutilated cross and the bullet marks in the church wall may indirectly be a more effective image of war than bloody scenes from the battlefield or faces contorted by despair; this was realised by the Polish film director Andrzej Wajda, the central debate of whose film Ashes and Diamonds, about the values that are destroyed by war, takes place amid the ruins of a bombed church before a Christ whose head dangles downwards.

Brandt, Martti
Lehtikuvia 1957–1994 [Press photographs 1957–1994]
Teksti: [Text by] Seppo Saves
Tammisaari: Studio Vidar, 2003.
120p., ill. ISBN 951-97386-4-9. € 49

Paul, Hans
Skett och sett. Näin olen nähnyt.
Fotografier 1965–2001. Valokuvia
1965–2001 [This is what I saw. Photographs 1965–2001]
Teksti: [Text by] Henrik Meinander
Helsingfors: Söderströms & Föreningen Konstsamfundet, 2003. 166p., ill.
ISBN951-52-2117-X. € 35

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