Franco Figari : Elias Lönnrot's homeland

ELIAS LÖNNROT'S HOMELAND is a book of photographs, mainly landscapes.
Most of the pictures have been taken in the countryside between Sammatti and Lohja where Elias Lonnrot passed his childhood on the shores of lake Valkjärvi.
Therefore the book is dedicated to Elias Lonnrot but also well represents the main ecosystems of Southern Finland: the Lake system formed by the last glaciation 10.000 years ago, the Countryside with its cultivated fields, the old farms and barns, the Forest, with its pine, fir and birch trees where a careful observer will be fascinated by the particular details of the undergrowth especially in autumn during ruska time.

Sometimes Finnish landscape is mistankely considered monotonous and repetitive. In this book the author wants instead to demonstrate how Nature, Master of painting, using brushstrokes of light, can change the same landscape also in a few minutes. In the last chapter of the book (GENIUS LOCI) the author decribes his hidden and magic corner of Finland, a place on the rock near lake Valkjärvi where he often sits surrounded by silence and observes the landscape through the lens of his camera, at dawn, at sunset, in the middle of the night with the full moon. Depending on the light the same landscape is always different!

The images of the book belong to a simple world, the same world only partially changed where Elias Lonnrot lived 200 years ago a world that can reveal a mystery or may uncover an idyll.

These are the chapters:
INTRODUCTION with map
ELIAS LÖNNROT'S HOMELAND
STILL WATERS
THE COUNTRYSIDE
SKIES OF WATER
THE FOREST AND ITS UNDERGROWTH
WHEN NATURE SLEEPS
GENIUS LOCI

Captions are concentrated at the end of the book and are enriched with the beautiful illustrations of Annalisa and Marina Durante