About Katri
 

Katri Elisabet Krohn Lassila (born in 1979) is a photographic artist and Doctor of Arts (2023) from Aalto University. She wrote her doctoral thesis about the temporal aspects and apochrony of landscape between photography and cinema, which may be read here in Finnish. Katri is listed in the Finnish Artist Register. She is the chair of the board of the Association of Photographic Artists.

Katri has had over 20 individual exhibitions in Finland and abroad since 1999 and she has taken part to several group and juried exhibitions, and also worked herself as a curator and portfolio reviewer. She is the vice chair and one of the founding members of the Finnish Darkroom Association which maintains darkroom Mörk at Helsinki, and organiser of the association’s international projects such as Helsinki Darkroom Festival, Nordic Analog Network , Analog Photography Festival Network and Helsinki Analog Festival. She teaches courses for the association, Aalto University and the Finnish Museum of Photography. She was in charge of the Aalto University’s graduate seminar at the Film Department in 2019-2023.

Recurring subject matters in Katri’s works are landscape and water, combined with the fleeting moments known from Henri Cartier-Bresson’s concept of the decisive moment.

I am interested in time, or rather the timelessness. In my dissertation I coined the term apochrony, deriving from the Greek words apo (ᾰ̓πό) and khronos (kroʊnɒs), to describe this outsideness of time. I am interested in the essence of the landscape behind its immediate surface. At the same time I look for the scenes where this eternal quality faces the imminent, and the passing of time becomes visible by something which cannot be repeated. The great power of photography lies in the question of time, and the dichotomy of its simultaneous momentariness and permanence.

Katri’s photographic work consists mostly of analogue black and white photography with a strong emphasis in demanding techniques of fine art darkroom printing.

Darkroom work is my passion. I started training it with my mentor in 1999 and fell in love with it right away. I love the challenge it offers and the element of surprise it entails. I give several exposures for the print, which is called “burning”, and “dodge” it as well. I bleach parts of the print chemically, tone it with photographic toners and spot the dust away by brush. My prints are handmade, from the beginning to the end.

Of her equipment Katri loves the most the Rolleiflex 2.8 (from 1964, gift from her mentor Pentti Sammallahti), but ventures sometimes with 4x5 and 35mm cameras. She works also with moving images, often combining digital and analogue. Her poetic short film Chalk Circles (2015) was screened at the festivals in Prague and Riga. Her latest short film and the artistic part of her dissertation The Cliff (2022), taking inspiration from Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) and Kanerva Cederström’s Trans-Siberia – Notes from the camps (1999), has been photographed with Leica M3 and the photographs combined digitally in the form of moving image.

Katri’s postdoctoral work includes several projects and articles written together with archaeologist Marja Ahola. Their shared research interest has focused on a phenomenological approach to landscape combining archaeological and artistic research, exploring how landscapes of the sacred burial sites may have been meaningful in the Stone Age, and how such relationships to place might be traced or revisited in the present. In 2026–2027, Katri is undertaking a postdoctoral residency at Orkney College, where through artistic research she explores the landscapes of Orkney’s archaeological sites and their changing qualities across different seasons and times of day.

Download the full CV here in Finnish and in English.