Singing Portraits — Hanne Larsen

KALEVALA SINGING PORTRAITS (VALOKUVA RUNOLAULAJISTA)

Kalevala emerges from a 2500–3000 year old oral song tradition in the Finnish–Karelian region. Runosong was the language of music and poetry in everyday life, ritual, and celebration, sung by everyone—without a fixed form, but layered with myths, incantations, and epic narratives. In the nineteenth century, Elias Lönnrot gathered these songs through encounters with living singers and assembled them into an epic. Kalevala is therefore not a single text, but the result of voices, places, and performances—a living material shaped in the meeting of song, memory, and landscape.

In this project (begun in 2010), I travelled through Finland, including Turku, Valtimo, Kantele, and Tampere, and photographed a selection of contemporary runosingers (runolaulajat) who continue to use these poetic songs in their music and performances. The musicians performed runosongs as I photographed them, as a way of documenting how Kalevala continues to live today through voice, body, and presence.