Janne Parviaien is a 35 year old photographer and painter from Finland, who sometimes uses the online alias jannepaint. He discovered light art by mistake in 2007 when he bumped into one of his cameras while shooting in a dark area, and was fascinated by the effects it created. He has since been featured in publications such as National Geographic and Wired magazine, and does some commercial work, including a project with Adobe Systems.
He lies in Helsinki, Finland, and is often inspired by the city and feelings of urban sprawl. He does many of his shoots in abandoned locations in and around the city. The work shown below was part of a shoot done a forest containing numerous abandoned cars.
Many of Parviaien’s inspirations and influences are easily represented by his oil paintings, which are done on old windows using both sides of the pane of glass. His oil paints are usually of sparse natural scenes, or scenes of urban detail, because his is interested in the “abstract rhythm” created by the growth of plants and
Oil painting on glass
graffiti around the existing landscape. He comments on his website about the subjects of his paintings: “What makes things beautiful in my opinion is the rhythm and life force of the subject, rather than culturally learned ideals.” These ideas can also be seen in many of his works of light art.
He believes the essence of light art is that there is no post production work, and all photos should come straight from the camera. For pictures with difficult perspective aspects, he plans them in his studio without using any computer assistance. He usually shoots in almost complete darkness, and his primary tools are actually LED finger lights that are intended to be children’s toys. He also uses flashlights and coloured gels, and occasionally chalk marks are used to guide his light traces and sometimes even incorporated into the picture itself.
The picture of his that is most recognizable to people is an image featured in National Geographic’s April issue in 2013. It is called “Days of Our Lives”, and it is an example of what he calls Light Topography, or tracing a room’s entire surface in light. The photo took a 24-minute exposure time to complete.
His works often contain a figure lying on the ground, or contain other eerie images, including glowing skeletons. These skeletons are featured in a music video he made for the song Helsinki Safari by Hahmo, another Finnish artist, which is a stop-motion video that includes almost 800 individual light paintings.
Another work of his, Catharsis, was chosen to be part of the promotional program for UNESCO’s Year of Light and Light-Based Technologies, which was an event hosted by the United Nations in 2015 that aimed to raise awareness about light-based technology an its applications. Catharsis is another example of light topography, and includes more color and complex figure shapes than Days of Our Lives.
