YEREVAN/KUKKOLA, Finland — Jaakko Heikkilä (born 1956) is a Finnish photographer known for his documentary-style portraits and ethnographic approach to photography. He studied civil engineering at the University of Oulu. While studying he started to take photograph and at the end of the year 1989 he left the University for concentrating totally on photography. Heikkilä has photographed groups such as the Meänkieli speakers in northern Scandinavia and Finno-Ugric peoples in Russia, exploring how traditions persist in modern contexts. His images are typically staged yet rooted in real environments, blending documentary and artistic composition. He has exhibited widely across Europe, with shows in museums and galleries in Finland, Sweden, Germany, and beyond. Heikkilä has also published several photobooks combining visual storytelling with anthropological insight (“Our land – Meänmaa,” 1992, “Pomors,” 2001, “Kukkolankoski,” 2005, “Silent Talks,” 2011, “Kitchen Talks,” 2014, “Rooms Hidden by the Water,” 2016, “Sweet Song of Harlem,” 2021, “Philosophy of Wealth,” 2022, etc.).
Dear Jaakko, your work often explores themes of identity, migration, and cultural memory, particularly among minority and marginalized communities. Armenia is relatively little known in Finland. How did Armenia and Armenians come into your focus?
I participated in August 2003 the group exhibition celebrating the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg. Sitting in the train back to Helsinki I shoved my Pomors book to the man who organized the Church Sings Festival in Helsinki. He leafed through the book, looked at me and leafed again. Then he asked: “Would You like to go to Armenia? We dedicate the 2005 festival to Armenia.” I answered yes without any hesitation. In April 2004 I worked for one month in Armenia. The project then took me to Los Angeles and Venice with the support of Finnish Frame. My first Armenia exhibition was in Venice Biennale 2005 organized by Finnish Frame.
Armenian Unspoken Destinies (2008) is among your published photography books documenting Armenians in Armenia, Los Angeles, and Venice. What did you uncover in this work?
In Los Angeles and Venice I recorded family histories that are somehow linked to the Ottoman genocide. All the stories are really touching. Here is the story of Vahe Berberian in Los Angeles:
“My father was born in 1914, one year before the Armenian massacres. He was just one year old when the deportations started. His entire family, including his father, was massacred. Not many from that village survived. During the deportations my grandmother was worried about my father dying of starvation. She did not want him to suffer. Three times she went to the river, to throw little Raffi into the water. But every time she came back, not having had the courage to do it. She told me that that the river had been so full of dead bodies that it would not have taken the baby.”
