Copyright

Leena-Maija Rossi; Sari Karttunen;

Published On

2025-06-23

Page Range

pp. 101–126

Language

  • English

Print Length

26 pages

5. The Helsinki School

Gendered Image Shaping and Gender-Based Violence in a Photography Branding Project

Chapter of: Gender-Based Violence in Arts and Culture: Perspectives on Education and Work(pp. 101–126)
The Helsinki School was founded as a coaching project for photography students in the early 1990s at the University of Art and Design Helsinki, currently the Aalto University School of Art, Design & Architecture. Curator Timothy Persons, who held the position of Adjunct Professor, began to internationalise the photography programme, with a module ‘Helsinki School Studies’ established in the Master’s Programme in Photography. The School taught a handpicked group of students, took them to international art fairs and introduced them to curators and buyers. The Helsinki School was largely celebrated as a brand, and a success story of internationalisation in the Finnish art scene, until, in early 2022, it came into the public eye in a different light: the media began publishing allegations of abuse of power and sexual harassment of students, and also exposed ambiguities in the School’s funding and a lack of transparency of operations. After an internal investigation, Aalto University terminated the module. Persons retired after a slight reprimand made public by the University.
This chapter continues the collaboration, which Rossi and Karttunen started in the early 2000s in the ‘Polar Stars’ project. Funded by the Academy of Finland, the project explored the internationalisation of Finnish photographic and video art. Our interviewees at the time drew attention to the selective access of students to the Helsinki School; we also noted far-reaching attempts to shape the students’ artistic production and image. The present chapter updates the research on the Helsinki School, examining the export project from the perspectives of visual sociology and gender studies. We carry out both visual and textual analysis of the Helsinki School publications and of related media material. The visual representations of gender and sexuality are analysed through close reading the distinct ways in which young female bodies are portrayed in the photographs. We ask whether the gendered image-shaping of both the photographs and the export project overall can be seen as a form of gender-based exploitation.

Contributors

Leena-Maija Rossi

(author)
Professor of Gender Studies at University of Lapland

Leena-Maija Rossi, PhD, works as Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Lapland (Finland). She is an expert in queer theory, intersectionality and visual culture. Her research interests also include critical studies on whiteness and posthumanist perspectives on gender. She holds the positions of Adjunct Professor in Visual Culture at the University of Turku, and in Art History and Gender Studies at the University of Helsinki. In addition to her academic career, she has served as the Executive Director of the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York, and worked as a freelance curator, collaborating with the major art museums in Helsinki, Finland.

Sari Karttunen

(author)
Senior Researcher at Center for Cultural Policy Research
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7248-4671

Sari Karttunen, DSoc Sc, is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Cultural Policy Research CUPORE in Helsinki. She is also a Visiting Researcher at the University of the Arts Helsinki and holds the title of Adjunct Professor in cultural policy at the University of Jyväskylä. Her expertise lies in the sociology of artistic occupations and the analysis and critique of cultural statistics and other knowledge bases used in cultural policy. Currently, her research interests focus on diversity issues within cultural policy. Sari is an active member of the Research Network on Sociology of the Arts of the European Sociological Association, having served as co-coordinator from 2017 to 2019 and coordinator from 2019 to 2021.