Eero Sauri - Photographs.

Eero Sauri (1938–) is a Finnish photographer, journalist, editor and publisher, born on 18 April 1938 in Rautavaara, Finland. He began making photographs while still at school in Kemi and was only sixteen when his first press photograph appeared on the front page of the newspaper Pohjolan Sanomat on 14 May 1954. During the summers of 1955 and 1956 he worked as a reporter for the Kemi newspaper Pohjois Suomi, travelling through the Torne Valley and the remote areas of Fell Lapland to produce photographs and written reports. His early work concentrated on people encountered in villages, farms and workplaces, including agricultural workers, reindeer herders, road construction crews, elderly residents and families living in isolated northern communities. Rather than separating photography from reporting, Sauri generally worked as both photographer and writer, producing sequences intended to accompany extended newspaper and magazine stories.

A substantial part of Sauri's surviving photography records northern Finland during a period of rapid social and economic change. His 1956 work in Palojärvi in Enontekiö documented a Sámi village near the Norwegian border before completion of the road connecting Hetta with Kautokeino. He photographed residents carrying out ordinary work and domestic activities as well as the seventeen man road crew surveying the new route. His report on Palojärvi was published on 4 August 1956. Other assignments covered Kemi, the Torne Valley, Käsivarsi, Päijät Häme and Kanta Häme, together with subjects including tourism, industry, mining, transport, scouting and the Finnish Reserve Officer School. After leaving school Sauri moved into magazine journalism, initially working for Kuva Posti and subsequently Apu. His assignments became geographically broader and included a substantial 1964 reportage from newly independent Kenya, where he photographed Nairobi and travelled through other parts of the country including Tsavo. The surviving archive therefore extends beyond his better known photographs of Lapland and demonstrates his development from local newspaper photography into national magazine reportage.

Photography eventually became one part of a much longer career in journalism and publishing. Sauri became managing editor of Apu in 1967 and its editor in chief in 1969 at the age of thirty one, thirteen years after his early Palojärvi reportage. He remained editor in chief until 1975 and subsequently held senior publishing positions within A lehdet and other Finnish publishing companies. His photographic archive nevertheless preserves the formative stage of that career. The Eero Sauri Collection in the Finnish Heritage Agency's JOKA Press Photo Archive contains more than a thousand catalogued records, with material dating principally from the 1950s and 1960s and additional photographs extending into the 1970s. The collection is particularly useful as a record of postwar Finland outside its major cities, showing northern communities at the point when new roads, tourism, industry and improved communications were altering established patterns of work and settlement. Sauri later documented his wider career in the memoir Apumiehenä ja Sanomarenkinä: Lehtimiehen ja kustantajan muistelmat, published in 2021.

Eero Sauri

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Photographs by Eero Sauri (1938–).
Eero Sauri Collection.
Source: Finnish Heritage Agency, JOKA Press Photo Archive.
Licence: CC BY 4.0.

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