Tutta Palin

2
Ester Helenius mainly used, in the journalistic context, very classical static portraits with
neutral backgrounds and no conventional professional attributes, such as those by Ivar
Helander (1895–1959), reserving more elaborate pictures taken in her own studio for her
personal acquaintances and patrons. For her, quality came before quantity. In the published
images, the selection of poses is scarce, the dress most often black. Many of the images have a
Benjaminian ‘auratic’ presence, reminiscent of early photography. There is often pathos
involved, and never humour. Photographs of her appeared mainly in the newspapers and in
more specialised art books, less in the illustrated press.
Essi Renvall, on the other hand, was much more agile and versatile in her self promotion. She
did not seem to regulate her media image as rigorously as Helenius. In the late 1930s and
1940s, portrait-like representations of Renvall, often at work in her elegant work attire,
abound in both the daily and the illustrated press as well as yearbooks of fine art. The style of
the images range from camera club type of “artistic” expression to especially made
photoreportage, such as “Work and Smile” by the photographer and editor Börje Sandberg in
the Kuva (Picture) magazine (5/1950), a magazine launched in 1937 following the concept of
the British Picture Post. Interestingly enough, one of the images shows the artist’s signature
as chiselled on a painted area of the glass door of her studio. The act of signing, and of
positing the professional ‘logo’ against her bosom, documents a cheerful sense of humour on
the part of the artist, lending at least part of the authorship to herself as the object of the gaze.
Yet it is clear that the reportage is a collaboration involving voluntary posing/staging from the
part of the sitter. The title “Work and Smile” in itself comments on her willingness to cooperate.
At the beginning of her career Renvall, indeed, worked herself for some years for an
advertising agency to support her growing family.
In their method of mediation and dispersal and in their mode of address, i.e. in the energy and
active mobility of her figure, Renvall’s strategies of the self can be read as more modern than
those of Helenius. But when it comes to iconography, including the femininity of her female
type, she hardly corresponds to the ideal of the new woman. Even though we see her working,
she is willing to play with her professional integrity. In some specific contexts, she even
agrees to leave the artist’s robe aside altogether and appear as a mother; an illustrative
example can be found in the newspaper of a large co-operative organization (“Essi Renvall: a
young talented sculptor”, Elanto 9.4.1943). Helenius on her part was a so-called independent,
self-supporting woman (Finn. itsellinen nainen), a femme seule, who in her interviews always
speaks as an artist whereas Renvall’s status as an artist’s spouse, before their divorce in 1944,
was often underlined by the press. Since there are also illustrations of her sculptural work in
the Elanto article, written by a woman, I read it as an articulation of the acutely modern
problem of combining motherhood and professional life.
I want to stress the fact that both of the strategies described were expressions of agency and
professionalism, albeit in different ways. The point of this paper has been to shift the authorial
status, or function, from the photographer and the photographic discourse to the sitters, in
order not to see them as passive objects of a camera or a gaze, nor as just another locus in a
network of meanings. It is, however, not an omnipotent authorship that I am delineating. The
sitters represent just one instance of the usage of the images, and even in their case I can only
detect the effects of their choices, not their intentions. What I am, anyhow, trying to do is to
treat them as historical agents, i.e. actual people who do things and who somehow matter or
have an effect on the surrounding world.