Recreating Modernist Artwork by Photograph

Fifteen years ago, says the Finnish photographer Niko Luoma, “my whole photographic process moved from the front of the camera to the inside.” He had already been pushing the boundaries of photography with minimalist landscapes and color studies, but now, rather than training his lens on the outside world, he would compose images in his Helsinki studio with overlapping colored filters and templates on a light table. For his new book, For Each Minute, Sixty-Five Seconds, Luoma found inspiration in the canon of Western art. His color-saturated images, each representing “a dialogue with the painting,” offer tributes to Vincent van Gogh, David Hockney and Pablo Picasso, artists whose very familiarity may, ironically, blind us to their brilliance. Luoma’s interpretations encourage us to see anew. “The most familiar thing in the world might look completely different if you just slow down, pay attention. You feel that you gain time,” Luoma says, offering a clue to his book’s time-warping title. “Something magical happens when you just slow down a little.”

Amy Crawford | | READ MORE

Amy Crawford is a Michigan-based freelance journalist writing about cities, science, the environment, art and education. A longtime Smithsonian contributor, her work also appears in CityLab and the Boston Globe.