On the face of it (pun intended), Finnish photographer Emma Sarpaniemi’s self-portraits are a bit tongue-in-cheek – revelling in poppy colours and featuring amusing props. But a second glance reveals something deeply personal and jarringly honest. We peel back the layers of this emerging talent as she continues to explore herself
From Cindy Sherman to Andy Warhol, the impulse to turn the camera on oneself has long been woven into the fabric of photography. What began as a technical experiment has evolved into a cultural ritual – a way of recording not just faces, but identities, moods, and moments of self-construction. Today, this practice has reached its most ubiquitous form in the era of the not-so-humble selfie, where self-portraiture has become both a performance and a habitual form of documentation.
It is rare, then, in an age of Photoshop, filters, and carefully curated poses, to encounter an artist so disarmingly honest and unguarded as Emma Sarpaniemi. The Finnish photographer – who, at the time of writing, is residing and working in Reykjavík, on residency at SÍM gallery – has devoted her artistic career to exploring the boundaries of self-portraiture. Her work, which has attracted the interest of many European galleries, including NEWEN in Gothenburg and Jarmuschek+Partner in Berlin, strips away the gloss of digital perfection, revealing instead something raw, at times humorous, and deeply human. Through her lens, the act of turning the camera on oneself rejects vanity for the sake of vulnerability – a dialogue between identity and imagination.
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Photo: Emma Sarpaniemi