Research
My PhD research, Being-with the Landscape: Understanding the Landscape through Image-making Practices, examines how landscape becomes available through contemporary image-making practices. The project explores how smartphones, cameras, screens, and image-sharing mediate human–landscape relations, shaping what we notice and how we frame, remember, and circulate those encounters.
Situated between visual culture, postphenomenology, philosophy of technology, and human geography, the research approaches landscape as material, representational, and practice-based. It asks how image-making participates in the experience of landscape and how technological mediations influence perception and meaning.
The project combines theoretical inquiry with visual and qualitative methods, including image analysis, digital ethnographic, Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), and practice-based experimentation.
The project is carried out under the supervision of Dr. Teemu Kempainen, Dr. Sanna T Lehtinen and Prof. Mari Vaattovaara.
Keywords: visual culture, postphenomenology, philosophy of technology, landscape theory, photography, smartphone image-making, digital ethnography, visual methods
Academic CV | University of Helsinki Researcher Profile | Google Scholar | LinkedIn
You can read my latest articles here:
Accepted / forthcoming: Image-making with the Landscape: Between Representation and Reification. Landscape Research Journal, 2026.
Published: #kalasatama: Discursive Views of the Helsinki Landscape Through the Virtual Window in Philosophy of the City Journal, University of Groningen Press, Vol. 1 No. 1, October 2023.
Now and again I write short articles about my research on either my blog or on my Substack. You can also watch some videos on my research through my YouTube channel.
Selected Conferences/Papers/Talks
Future
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Past
Presentation Title: Image-making with the Landscape: Between Representation and Reification
Helsinki PhotoMedia, Aalto University
15 -17 April 2026
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Presentation Title: Image-making with the Landscape: Between Representation and Reification
Experiencing Environments – Human Perspectives in the Changing World
XVI International Summer Conference of the International Institute of Applied Aesthetics, Lahti, Finland.
10 – 12 June 2025
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Presentation Title: Empathy and Landscape
International Visual Literacy Association Annual Conference
Murray State University, Kentucky, USA.
4 November 2024
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Presentation Title: Empathy and Landscape
Helsinki PhotoMedia, Aalto University
11 – 13 April 2024
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Presentation Title: #kalasatama: Discursive Views of Helsinki Through the Virtual Window.
Scoping Sustainable Aesthetics – Rethinking Nature, Man-Made Environment.
Summer Congress of the International Institute of Applied Aesthetics.
12 – 14 June 2023
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Artist Talk
PhotoIreland Festival 2022, PrintWorks, Dublin Castle, Ireland
9 July 2022
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Presentation Title: #kalasatama: Discursive views of the Helsinki skyline through the virtual window
Helsinki PhotoMedia, Aalto University
31 March – 2 April 2022
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Paper Title: ‘A Place Like All Others: Using Ethnography to Address Representation’.
Landskrona Foto, Sweden.
30 September – 1 October 2021
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Paper Title: ‘#kalasatama: Digital Visual Representations and the (Re)Making of Urban Publics’.
Royal Geographical Society annual conference – Imagined, imaginative, and imaginary geographies
Newcastle University, UK.
31 August – 3 September 2021