Study of Stillness

I traveled through Finland without a fixed route, moving between small towns, frozen lakes, forests, and domestic interiors. I wasn’t searching for dramatic landscapes or decisive moments. I was paying attention to what happens when very little happens.

 

Stillness, I learned, is not the absence of movement. It is a different rhythm altogether. A rhythm shaped by long winters, low light, and an unspoken agreement with nature: you don’t impose yourself here, you adapt.

 

All the images in this series were shot on 35mm film.

Film demands patience. It resists immediacy. It asks you to slow down, to trust instinct, and to accept what you cannot fully control. That process became inseparable from the experience of the place itself—restrained, deliberate, and uncompromising if rushed.

 

Houses appear isolated but grounded. Roads stretch forward without urgency. Animals move with quiet purpose. Human presence is sparse, yet deeply embedded in the landscape. Nothing feels staged. Everything feels lived-in.

 

In Finland, silence is not uncomfortable. It’s functional.
It creates space—for thought, for listening, for existing without explanation.

 

As the journey progressed, I became increasingly aware of my own pace—how quickly I wanted to move, how often I felt the urge to fill the quiet. Over time, that impulse softened. I began to notice subtleties: the way light rests on snow at dusk, the density of still air before nightfall, the calm certainty of places that don’t ask to be photographed.

 

This body of work isn’t about Finland as a destination. It’s about what remains when distraction is removed. About how landscapes shape behavior, and how solitude can feel expansive rather than lonely.

 

The images sit somewhere between documentary and memory. They are fragments—incomplete by design. I wanted them to function as pauses rather than statements, moments that invite the viewer to slow down rather than consume.

 

Study of Stillness is an attempt to hold onto that tempo.
To resist immediacy.
To sit with quiet.