Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma

Photo: Eetu Sillanpää: Sillanpää’s photo from the Kauhajoki school shooting in Finland was awarded Best News Photograph of the year in 2008.

This interview was translated and condensed by Klas Backholm. The complete Finnish-language interview can be found on the Dart Center Finnish Network page.

“A picture has no meaning at all if it can’t tell the story,” says Eetu Sillanpää, a photographer from the Finnish newspaper Pohjalainen. In his view, a beautiful and technically competent photo will fail if it does not throw light on the unfolding crisis it seeks to capture.

Eetu Sillanpää headed to Kauhajoki a day after a shooting in a vocational college had left eleven dead. He knew that he wouldn't be able to get close to the building: It had been closed down. Driving there, he turned over in his mind what it would take to capture the emotional core of the story, the shock of what transpired and the need to ask: "How could this have happened?"

Sillanpää had no desire to take pictures of the bereaved.

“If you want to move people to action with your pictures, you can’t show things that are too terrible. If you do, people will automatically react negatively and turn away from the message. Instead of showing everything, you need to spark the viewer’s imagination,” says Sillanpää.

To find an image that would spark the imagination, he had to search all day.

“On the scene there was an overwhelming feeling of sorrow. I was looking for shock and disorientation in people’s faces. When I saw those girls, I knew that this is the picture. It was a conscious choice,” recalls Sillanpää.

Sometimes Sillanpää will select a technically inferior photograph if its story content is sufficiently suggestive.

“A picture has no meaning without that. Its main goal is always to provide a feeling, even if it is one of shock or despair,” he says.

A photographer has to win the trust of the people he is photographing to achieve this. Sillanpää will only start taking pictures once he has made some contact with the subject that he is interested in.

At a crisis scene, he always tries to keep in mind that, before being a photographer, he is first and foremost a human being: “I try to imagine how it would be if I was the one whose photo was being taken — how I would want others to approach me in such a situation.”

Sillanpää does not think a photographer always needs to ask for explicit permission before pressing the shutter. Through years of experience, he has learned how to interpret and note small gestures and expressions that can signify permission. But he also feels it is important that a photographer makes clear his or her professional aims.

Read the complete Finnish-language interview on the Dart Center Finnish Network page. There, Sillanpää describes the personal impact of being on assignment in Kosovo and how overcoming post-traumatic stress has helped him work more effectively in other crisis situations.