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THE LOVELIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD –PHOTOGRAPHY
PROJECT
The Loveliest Girl in the World is a community
art project undertaken by photographer, art and social educator Miina
Savolainen with ten girls from Hyvönen Children's Home. It has taken almost a
decade to complete. The project is based on the idea of “empowerment” and the
belief that everyone has the right to feel unique and special. The fairytale quality
of the photographs reveals a truth often obscured by the rough and tumble of
daily life - the person each young girl feels she really is inside. It allows
the girls to regard themselves as strong and undamaged people. These
photographs are deeply authentic, revealing the universal desire to be seen
as good and valuable.
“Photography can help to show people how they are treasured; how much they
mean to me,” writes Miina Savolainen. “Accepting one's own portrait is a
metaphor for accepting one’s own personality. During years the photographing
has become an intimate and profound way to interact with the girls. This
exceptional long-term relationship can be seen in the special kind of
openness and intimacy of the photographs.
Although the pictures in the series of the Loveliest Girl in the World are
artificial and not from the everyday life they are bound to the tradition of
realistic photography. The documentary quality of the pictures is
multilayered. On one hand the pictures are documents of growing up, the young
girls' personalities and dreams. On the other hand the pictures make certain
features of the girls visible which cannot be seen in their everyday selves.
The childhood of the young who have grown up in a Children's home includes a
lot of feelings of being abandoned and of being invisible. It also includes
the burden of other people's prejudices, the stigmatisation of being a Children's
home resident. The fairytale-like pictures are juxtaposed with real life
story that seldom had fairytale qualities. The pictures express sadness but
also hope and desire to see oneself in a more gentle way. With the aid of the
non-everyday world of the pictures the young have been allowed to be seen and
to see themselves differently like never before.
The girls do not see the pictures as role-playing. In the everyday life the
girls may also lead “roles” which appear wrong and foreign to the girls. The
pictures may show, for the first time, a side that the young person holds
real and dear to herself, a picture that she wants to cherish in her mind. The
Loveliest Girl in the World -pictures are extreme documents: they are
pictures of a person’s inner identity. This inner side becomes visible and
the deeper emotional “truth” can be reached by mixing the truth and the
fiction. Every human being has an inviolable right to feel himself or herself
special. The pictures are a proof of conclusiveness of the photograph, which
is not only bound to what’s visible.
The Loveliest Girl in the World doesn't portray the Children's home residents
the way the people living in margins are usually portrayed. The pictures are
also something else from the sexist way of how young women and girls are
exhibited in today's public places. Above all the fairy-tale feeling of the
pictures is metaphorical; it is a longing for a clean, innocent state of
dreaming where you can see yourself as a whole and an ideal person, protected
from the gaze and the expectations of other people. The series brings up
questions on how the present visual culture makes one a part of the society.
The pictures of the young in the Children's home tell stories of being a girl
and being a human in general. The deepest content of the pictures, the need
to be seen, is familiar to anyone. The attempt to learn to see oneself in a
more gentle way is especially addressing in our time where people are
surrounded by the endless requirements from different fields of life. The
Loveliest Girl in the World exhibitions have prompted the public to think
about the capacity of the photograph to influence on societal and personal
levels. From the point of view of photography the project also raises
questions about the author and ethics. This project could be seen as
community photography. It includes the models not only in the creation of the
photographs but also in the selection of the exhibited pictures.
The project, its accompanying exhibition and Miina Savolainen has been
awarded the Spotlight of the Year 2003 special prize of the jury, the Vision
of the Year award 2004, Duodecim Finnish Medical Association’s 2005 Cultural
Award, the Young Photographer of the Year award 2005 and the State Award for
Children´s Culture 2006. Patricia Seppälä Foundation, the Finnish Cultural
Foundation, Finnfoto and the City of Helsinki have supported the production.
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