Janne Lehtinen: The Descendants
by: Lehtinen, Janne

Hardcover. Hatje Cantz, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 80 pages. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Janne Lehtinen's bleak yet arresting photographs of his hometown in the south of Finland are reproduced in this slim, elegant volume. In this new autobiographical project, Lehtinen takes us to Lehtiskyla, where the locals believe that everyone who comes to stay will meet with a sad, usually sinister and absolutely inevitable fate. The images and their accompanying memories--his sick uncle's little bottles of pills, a corpse floating in the river, the last meal eaten by his old horse, a schoolmate's accident--do not promise better things to come, yet there is a certain beauty to the "curse" of Lehtiskyla. This very personal, melancholy album of photographs records the journey of Lehtinen and his cousin to their childhood house and other places of their youth.