Blow-up, masculine trouble
"Batteries and street fights are everynight activities during the weekends in Finland. People have a strong tendency of getting rather intoxicated during the partying and, once drunk, people are released from their inhibitions. Aggression turns into physical acts, to direct violence," says Finnish visual artist Harri Pälviranta. He is currently showing his photographic series Battered in Fotografiska's new exhibition surveying contemporary men and masculinities. In Harder Better Faster Stronger – Are Men OK?, Pälviranta's images show individuals who are victims of interpersonal direct violence that takes place in public spaces. "Regardless of all good will and clever rhetoric, people identified as men solve their troubles by physical means," he shares in our interview.
C-P: In the context of an exhibition which extends a scrutinizing lens on models of masculinity, where does your work about bar fights, and presumably violent urges as both innate and constructed, sit?
H.P: The project was conducted in 2006-2007, and back then some 35,000 assaults were registered per year in Finland. Things haven't improved since: in 2025, Finnish officials registered nearly 45,000 violent assaults. Interestingly, the issue is very gendered. People categorised as men commit approx. 80% of these, and the more severe the assault, the higher the figure, up to 85-90%. Assaults in public space are heavily dominated by men, whereas in the domestic domain women are more active, though still a clear minority. Accordingly, the work is about a phenomenon that is gender-biased. Observed from a more subjective approach, this is all part of contemporary masculinity, and very normal in Finland. Regardless of all good will and clever rhetoric, people identified as men solve their troubles by physical means.
In this exhibition at Fotografiska, Battered perhaps represents the more violent end, yet still shows rather innocent behaviour. Much more radical pictorial approaches could have been taken, e.g. portraits of school shooters, or a focus on war crimes, crimes against humanity, etc. Most of these crimes are committed by men.
C-P: As someone with an interest in combat sports and not a stranger to contextualised and consented fighting, I ask out of curiosity how distanced or “invested” you are in the fighting that is observed. What I’m getting at is: how multifaceted is the fascination behind the documentary lens?
H.P: I do not have a personal history of street fighting, and although I have done sports all my life, I haven't practised any combat sports. So I do not know how to fight. Weirdly, I sometimes fantasise about being able to act violently. This is something that interests me: where this model originates, and how a well-educated, middle-aged man like me can still have these kinds of twisted desires.
As for the actual fights I witnessed, I was there as a plain observer, a total outsider. However, when one follows these types of happenings, one learns their logic. Because of this, as an observer I perhaps could have intervened in ways other than photography, but I did not. My role was clear to me: to make pictures.
Fascination, hmm. I understand the interest in MMA, for instance, as these sports have a set duration, choreography, context, etc. Fights in public space are not like that. In my experience they usually last two seconds, have no interesting visual appearance, and are in every way totally banal. But doing a photographic project on the topic surely means being fully immersed in it: constantly thinking about the ethics, tolerating the pressure and tiredness, studying the issue, talking to police and other officials and also to victims and fighters, etc. It was a very burdensome project to do, and exhibiting it always brings multifaceted feelings to the surface.
C-P: Have you ever felt in danger yourself, finding yourself in a scene in the aftermath of aggression, with tension still lingering on site?
H:P: Yes, sure, this is true of many of my projects. With the Battered project, as mentioned, most fights were over in a couple of seconds, and thus no aggression really lingered afterwards. However, on a few occasions someone from the crowd around the fight did try to assault me, but I was able to talk my way out of it. Once or twice I needed to escape. But in all these cases the threat came from someone other than the parties involved in the battery.
Thinking about this a bit further, I have an idea about a practice I define as affective witnessing. It is a concept and discourse still under construction and negotiation, but simply put, it is about acknowledging, also bodily, one's interest in the world before the camera lens; allowing oneself to be affected physically; and reflecting strongly on one's physical reactions, feelings and thoughts in uncomfortable situations. It is part of the discourse around post-documentary practice. This just means that I need to be involved, at least in some sense: not truly participating, but being present.
C-P: Generally speaking, what agency and shield does the camera offer? The camera must be both an invitation to “enter” at times, and at other times an alienating factor that disrupts a social contract on the spot.
H.P: Quite right. The camera has the potential to establish different roles and ways of acting, and having a camera openly visible surely changes social negotiations in some ways. As a very experienced practitioner, I deliberately try to use the camera in ways beneficial to my purposes, including the social roles the camera carries. Much of the work is about gaining access and getting permissions, which involves all sorts of manoeuvres, with the act of photography itself being only a small part of the work.
C-P: Do you get a sense of how a legacy of masculine ideals and roles might differ between Finland and, say, Sweden? I’m getting at whether it is possible to pinpoint regional “distances.”
H.P: I do not know, but I would still say there are many similarities, and surely also differences. Sometimes it makes me wonder how uniform the features and qualities of masculinity seem to be regardless of place and country.
C-P: Speaking to you offered much to think about, thank you. What’s next for you?
H.P: Well, I am always working on several projects simultaneously, as they are often at different stages and require different ethos and ways of working. To mention a few: a new book on wildfires, called Burn Index, is coming out in November. I am also printing a new body of work touching on the Finnish Civil War of 1918, which will be exhibited for the first time in January. And I am developing a project focusing on the nuclear threat, but it is at a very early stage. There is a lot to do, and I am happy to have great working conditions to push everything further. Ashik Zaman