Toomas Kalve

When Toomas Kalve was a child in Tartu, his family rented a room to a Soviet officer who practiced photography, using their bathroom to develop his photographs after work. This ignited Kalve’s interest in photography at an early age. Even as a schoolboy, he started to experiment with photography, and in 1978 he started to participate in photography courses at the Tartu Cultural Building. Since 1982 he has been a member of the Tartu Photo Club (since 1988 serving as its president).

Kalve quickly established himself as an exhibiting photographer, winning various prizes for his photos. Without a stable day job, he occasionally earned a living photographing weddings and funerals, but his main focus was his own work.

In the 1980s photography in Soviet Estonia was largely a club activity, with small groups of amateur photographers gathering, discussing, and exhibiting their work. Not only was photography officially excluded from the discipline of art owing to the lack of a proper educational system, but aspiring photographers were largely self-taught or were instructed by friends, peers, or even relatives. Merilin Talumaa has observed, “A revival of sorts in Estonian photography took place in the mid 1960s, which continued to affect its development until the end of 1980s, but it was not enough to create a permanent tradition and to organically combine photography with visual arts. The main problem lay in the fact that in the mid 1960s there were no local traditions to lean on.” [1]

This cultural isolation led the photographers to push for photography to be deemed a high art. As a result of both censorship and personal preferences, they ignored the political and documentary potential of photography in favor of such qualities as beauty, atmosphere, and emotion. “I think it is good when pictures are resistant to explanations,” Kalve said in 1987. “You watch and sense, finding yourself in a very special condition. In those moments, it is better to keep things unsaid, because talking only destroys the unique feeling, implied voices, and colors.” [2]

Like many of his generation, Kalve found the basis for his creations in the ideals of early modernism, although he has always been somewhat unconcerned with other people’s work. “I have never been too interested in what’s going on with other artists,” he once explained. “Maybe I’m afraid that this knowledge will affect my own work. I have always worked very unconsciously; I don’t like analysis.” [3]

In those early years, Kalve mostly interacted with young painters from a private Pallas art studio that followed the ideals of impressionism. “I was very much influenced by impressionism,” the artist says. Together with one of the painters, Imat Suumann (b. 1964), he studied a monograph of the Czech photographer Jan Saudek’s photographs, whose hand-colored photos depicting bizarre human interactions and the similarities with photos from nineteenth century became Kalve’s main source of inspiration.

As the turbulent political changes of the late 1980s unfolded, photography began to gain more esteem and attention in the Estonian art world. By this time Kalve had modified his artistic approach, subsequently beginning work on the series Untitled (1991, ZAM, D16387–D16392). In addition, Kalve banded together with a group of artists consisting of Peeter Laurits (b. 1962), Toomas Volkmann (b. 1961), Jaak Kadarik (b. 1957), Toomas Kaasik (b. 1951), and Herkki Erich Merila (b. 1964), who called themselves Igavesti sinu (Forever Yours). “We don’t have a common philosophy, method, or style,” they claimed. “We are different enough to work together without handcuffs.” [4] Forever Yours photographers sought to attract foreign curators, eventually having exhibitions in the United States, Belgium, Denmark, and Finland. The group dissolved in spring 1992 after an exhibition at the Roy Boyd Gallery in Chicago.

At one point, the Forever Yours group decided to create what Kalve called a “large and powerful exhibition,” for which he decided to do something “very simple.” Although he was typically interested in works with calm atmosphere and a still-life feeling, in the spring of 1991 he visited the Tartu Anatomical Institute, where, thanks to a relative, he was allowed to spend a couple of weeks photographing autopsies and other everyday activities. He found the scenes “awful and impressive.” For some pictures, he added objects from home such as small statues; he made use of strange changes in light, especially in spaces where newly deceased persons lay, with the result that one side of the picture was differently lit from the other. The 1991 Untitled series especially stands out in Kalve’s overall oeuvre, although the topic of death is often present elsewhere in his work. Around the same period, he based a series on dead birds and home altars with rubbish collected around trash bins. A large portion of his work to this day is dedicated to still lifes, portraits, interiors, and staged group compositions, re-creating impressionistic photography from the 1920s.

A defining feature of Kalve’s work is the use of old plate cameras, the oldest of them having hand-polished lenses from 1872. By taking photos on glass plates (he started with 13 x 18 cm plates but now works with those measuring 24 x 30 cm), Kalve believes he captures much more information.

The artist and photographer Jaak Kadarik offers his own explanation of Kalve’s photos: “There is always one thing in Kalve’s pictures that causes shivers: often the light, but sometimes some detail is supported in such a way that when we see it, our sense of security in this world collapses. The picture stands alone and does not resemble anything. It is profound.” [5]

Eero Epner    

Notes:

1. Merilin Talumaa, “The Lost Decades of Estonian Photography,” kunst.ee, February 2013.

2. “Toomas Kalve. Ise oma fotost,” Noorte Hääl, June 7, 1987.

3. “Toomas Kalve Answers Peeter Linnap’s Questions,” Hinokad.eu.

4. Always Yours (Chicago: Roy Boyd Gallery), 1992.

5. Jaak Kadarik, “Kalve ülekuulamine raevanglas,” Sirp, March 31, 2023.