To fully experience Jari Silomäki’s work, a trip to Pictura is in order, where you can see 75 photographs from a few decades of My Weather Diary in succession along the wall. 

But I think the images also have a lot to offer when examined one by one. (Jari’s small text may be hard to read online, so I’ll transcribe it under the image.)

“Late evening in Helsinki. I plant corn seedlings in my small plot. A moment later a video goes viral on facebook. A police officer called Derek Chauvin kills an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, who was begging for mercy.”

I remember my own experience of this news, and I imagine you do too. Silomäki shows us the way it registered across the ocean, with the same gasping force to any person watching.

This photograph is shot low to the ground, with a view from the dirt to the blurred fading light of day. The corn plants are just getting going, the green seedlings asking for sunshine and fresh air. The rich dark soil in the community garden looks ready to nurture life. It’s incongruous — to hold this in your mind and also the hard cement ground where Floyd was trapped, at the same time.

Jari layers the news with his daily life, in part to name this experience: the powerless feeling of grief, from a position of safety and distance.

-Lisa Woodward