OMATANDANGOLE

Omatandangole is a photo book, shot in the Namibian desert between 2016-2018. The book is published by Kehrer Verlag, 2019.

”Like bad memories, things disappear into the shadows. Huhta’s brand of camouflage is about invisibility, merging with dark, staying still, soaking up all light. These photographs seem to have fingerprints, or brush strokes. There’s an anachronistic pictorialist feel to them, like the rubbing and pushing of gum bichromate. Rather than recording the space before a lens, they pay homage to paint, sacred geometry, dream logic, and the weather system of emotions within the artist himself. But it’s a weather system with enough charge to blow across the reader as well, like heat on skin, sand in the eye, and dry darkness from the far recesses of the soul.” – Sarah Bay Gachot, Photo Eye 2019

“Sometimes it doesn’t even look like the planet we know, though it might be the one we’re in the process of making (or rather, destroying). There is perhaps some consolation in the purity of this scoured landscape that Huhta evokes, the sense that at least something will endure, shown by the presence of strangely altered plants and animals. These encounters demonstrate how such a fearsome landscape occasions some fundamental disordering of the categories we take for granted, revealing how the oppositions of organic and inorganic, natural and unnatural, are really just a consequence of our finite view.” – Darren Campion, Unseen Platform 2018

”The photographs were taken in Namibia, but the book is really more of a work about the photographer’s inner life. “Omatandangole” is made up of high-contrast black and white images, interspersed with a few color images. And rather than being a purely descriptive record of what the country looks like, they are rich with symbolism, a testament to the photographer’s mind-set while working on the project.” – Kenneth Dickerman, The Washington Post 2019

“Even though our surroundings are chaotic and broken it is possible to create photographs that show them as complete and pristine, so unlike what they are in reality. And yet – in that brief moment that is captured by the camera, wasn’t that sense of completeness true for a fleeting moment? An elusive bliss that can dissolve as fast as it emerged.” – Aapo Huhta