Ritva Kovalainen & Sanni Seppo: Pohjoistuulen metsä

Ritva Kovalainen and Seppo’s photographic non-fiction book “Forest of the Northern Wind” takes a journey into the unknown. The great unknown – the Finnish natural forest – is home to tens of thousands of organisms. One lives in an owl’s vomit ball, another at the base of a gnarled ancient pine, a third needs a multi-peaked wilderness. For some, a metre is a long way, for others a century is too short, and all are intertwined through complex networks of interactions.

The latest book by two award-winning photographers Ritva Kovalainen and Sanni Sepo, Forest of the Northern Wind” , introduces us to a natural forest that persists as islands near the eastern border in North Karelia, Kainuu and Lapland. In the hypersea of the natural forest, worms and goldfinches flit about, messages are carried in underground networks, as scent molecules carried by the wind or as infrasound and ultrasound. There, ecological processes maintain the diversity of ecosystems, with old, false, slow-growing, large, dying and dead trees creating abundance and continuity. Water circulates and purifies. Carbon is sequestered and stored in the abundance of forest.

The book is based on many years of photographic work in natural forests, scientific publications, reports, fictional descriptions of forests, dialogue with scientists and activists, and discussions in on various platforms.