When I first met Elina Brotherus a couple of years ago, she came across as a diffident but concentrated artist who was refreshingly straightforward about her intentions as a photographer. At the time, she had achieved some success with her self-portraits and landscapes that she had done in France and her native Finland, and she had recently begun a sequence of photographs she calls The New Painting. Considering that the history of photography has featured many struggles to distinguish itself from painting by making the most of photography’s ability to capture a trace of the real, in order to do something that painting could never realize; there is something anachronistic about calling a photographic project The New Painting, perhaps a sniff of the misty lenses of Pictorialism. Yet Brotherus has produced a body of contemporary photography that is remarkable for its wit and clarity. The images in The New Painting do not look overblown in ambition or weighed down by their engagement with the history of painting. Her vision is playful rather than agonised, one willing to show how painting and photography interact in an under-explored system of confluences. Her willingness to play, to invite us to see how the real is conventional and the conventional real, is both bold and joyful. The latest work, which we discuss here, shows how fruitful it can be to think about photography, for a while at least, in terms of The New Painting.

This interview was conducted via email during the summer of 2003.

Craig Burnett (CB): The earlier self-portraits explored how you felt or what you were doing at a very specific time, whereas the new images, even though they can be considered self-portraits, are less personal. Do you agree that there was a change in emphasis and what gave rise to the change?

Elina Brotherus (EB): There was indeed. The ‘hinge’ series is Suites Françaises 2 from autumn 1999 (the work where I’m learning French and exploring my surroundings with the aid of post-it notes). This work has a personal story: this young woman arriving to a new country, her feelings of outsiderness, the shy beginning of a new love story. The starting point is practical – everyday life, the need to learn to communicate in a new language. But it grows into something more theoretical and general. There is the question of naming and classifying objects. There is the tension of image and text present in the same work, much treated in 20th-century art, which can produce a dramatic and/or a funny effect. There is the problem of linguistic and cultural outsiderness, experienced by more and more people in the modern world.

Since 2000, I have been working on the series The New Painting, and I still don’t see the end of the project. In these pictures it is not at all important that the model be me – it’s only a figure in space, a model, in the same sense as a painter might use a model, and there is no personal narrative whatsoever.

CB: Some of your earlier work in The New Painting was reminiscent of Modernist and 19th – century painting (Surrealism, Romanticism), but some of the new work (Nu Endormi and Baigneuse de Saturnia) reminds me of Rococo painting or even Poussin. How does the history of painting inform your processes?

In art history, the periods that affect me most are the Italian Renaissance, Flemish painters of the 17th century and some turn-of-the-century French painters (Cézanne, Gauguin, Degas, Bonnard). The serenity and skill are stunning, and I find that their work is still completely relevant today.

I don’t especially like baroque or romantic painting; I often find it too sugary. Though I like Lorrain and Poussin, for their high viewpoint and a route for the gaze in the image; and the omnipresent Caspar David Friedrich. My two works that make reference to him, Personnage dans un paysage (montagne) (2000), and Der Wanderer, (2003), are humorous clin-d’oeils. Both comment on his famous painting of the man standing in front of a ‘sea of clouds’ in the mountains. The title of Der Wanderer is directly borrowed from this painting of Friedrich’s, but the figure – contrary to what the masculine form “der” in the title suggests – is female. Nu Endormi makes reference to sleeping Venuses, especially Giorgione’s.

Baigneuse de Saturnia belongs to my series of bathers that I started in 2000 with Personnage dans un paysage (eau), continues with Les Baigneurs (2000), La Baigneuse (2001), Figure au bord de l’eau (2002), and a video triptych Baigneurs (2001/2003). It pays homage to the tradition of bathers, starting with the Renaissance (Diana with her nymphs for instance), and of course Cézanne and his contemporaries. Saturnia is the name of the place where the picture was taken.

I never copy any old paintings as such or make my versions of them, but the same subject matter inspires me. I find it enough to treat in my work the basic, fundamental questions of all visual art: light, colour, composition, human figure, space – and beauty, if I dare say. In a way, the subject matter is only a pretext. Working, for me, is watching the world with a sensitive eye, to stay alert and ready to react rapidly when I see something that I want to make a picture of. Seeing is most important; sensing the light; guessing the inherent possibilities of some view; distilling the essential. There are no rules for this really – that’s why I think we can speak about intuition or sensitivity.

CB: The light, colours and sense of space in Figure au bord de l’eau make a striking image, but the photograph is slightly comic because the male figure looks vulnerable and out of place.

EB: It’s the glasses! This is a funny detail, but I think that a nude figure that wears glasses looks funny. Further, I think humour is not a bad thing in art – it makes it more human. There has been, especially in my early work, so much tragedy, that I think it’s good if I can occasionally make people smile.

CB: But do you think its possible for subject matter to collide with the pleasure of looking?

Photographs are projections of small fragments of the three-dimensional reality, flattened and framed and lifted up on a wall. I have tried to seize something meaningful, and by this, I mean visually interesting.