The Helsinki School: Gendered Image Shaping and Gender-Based Violence in a Photography Branding Project

The Helsinki School was founded as a coaching project for photography students in the early 1990s at the University of Art and Design Helsinki, currently the Aalto University School of Art, Design & Architecture. Curator Timothy Persons, who held the position of Adjunct Professor, began to internationalise the photography programme, with a module ‘Helsinki School Studies’ established in the Master’s Programme in Photography. The School taught a handpicked group of students, took them to international art fairs and introduced them to curators and buyers. The Helsinki School was largely celebrated as a brand, and a success story of internationalisation in the Finnish art scene, until, in early 2022, it came into the public eye in a different light: the media began publishing allegations of abuse of power and sexual harassment of students, and also exposed ambiguities in the School’s funding and a lack of transparency of operations. After an internal investigation, Aalto University terminated the module. Persons retired after a slight reprimand made public by the University.

This chapter continues the collaboration, which Rossi and Karttunen started in the early 2000s in the ‘Polar Stars’ project. Funded by the Academy of Finland, the project explored the internationalisation of Finnish photographic and video art. Our interviewees at the time drew attention to the selective access of students to the Helsinki School; we also noted far-reaching attempts to shape the students’ artistic production and image. The present chapter updates the research on the Helsinki School, examining the export project from the perspectives of visual sociology and gender studies. We carry out both visual and textual analysis of the Helsinki School publications and of related media material. The visual representations of gender and sexuality are analysed through close reading the distinct ways in which young female bodies are portrayed in the photographs. We ask whether the gendered image-shaping of both the photographs and the export project overall can be seen as a form of gender-based exploitation.