Repetition without Reproduction: Esko Männikkö’s The Female Pike

Abstract

Esko Männikkö's The Female Pike (1990Pike ( -1995 depicts lonely, middle-aged men at their homes in the economically depressed, depopulated rural regions of northern Finland. Initially, the photographic series seems to share the goal that the photographer Bert Teunissen establishes for his ongoing Domestic Landscapes project: to salvage the remnants of cultural particularity before they are obliterated by the homogenizing effects of globalization. However, rather than reproducing or preserving national identity, Män-nikkö's repetition of a rural iconography weighted with cultural significance in Finland has the effect of hollowing it out, opening a space to rethink it in his subsequent series Organized Freedom, Edition 2 (2001).