Filming under a clear blue Helsinki sky

Yann Arthus-Bertrand took to the air to get some shots of his Earth from Above exhibition

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By Kati Sinisalo
     
      "So is that the Parliament Building?"
      Yann Arthus-Bertrand, the photographer whose images of the planet from the air have made him world-famous, has taken to the skies again.
      He is crouched in a helicopter over the heart of downtown Helsinki, and is looking down on the Lutheran Cathedral, bathed in the warm glow of the early evening sun.
      "Ah. Well, it looks like an official building."
     
The rear hatch of the chopper is open, and Arthus-Bertrand points his lens towards the church below.
      "Now to the right. Right... And a bit more to the right."
      The pilot Timo Heloaho banks the Bell Jet Ranger evenly around the white cathedral.
      So, this is what the earth looks like at precisely 60° 11' N, 24° 56' E.
      It's a beautiful world indeed from up here, and a clear blue photographer's sky.
     
Arthus-Bertrand came to Finland and Helsinki to open his large Earth from Above exhibit in the square behind the building known as the "Glass Palace", a location that until recently housed the city's long-distance coach station.
      After the opening ceremony, the French photographer is heading out for a three-hour photoshoot in the archipelago off the coast of Tammisaari and Hanko, but before that there is time to take a quick whirl over the rooftops of Helsinki's southern tip.
      It's still more than three hours to sunset, and the light is just perfect.
      "You know, the last time I came to Helsinki it was in the middle of winter. This is NOT the same city at all. Just everything looks quite different", says Arthus-Bertrand with genuine astonishment.
     
The photographer's assistant Frederic Lenoir has set up the chopper with nine cameras and different lenses. On this first short flight there is no space for him, but Lenoir almost always accompanies Arthus-Bertrand and fills in the flight logbook of places and coordinates.
      This year the pair's photo assignments have taken them to places such as Indonesia, where they recorded the impact of last December's tsunami, to the UN-monitored demilitarised zone between North and South Korea, to the Dominican Republic, to Corsica, and to Haiti.
      Next week they are off to Algeria, not for the first time this year.
     
The exhibition, too, leads a traveller's life. It has recently been set up in Kabul, in Ljubljana in Slovenia, on the South Bank in London, in Geneva, and in Santo Domingo.
      It has been seen collectively by an estimated 60 million people.
     
As soon as the helicopter lifts off, the surface of the earth begins to morph into geometric patterns. The world becomes an aesthetic object.
      Arthus-Bertrand does not waste a moment. He starts taking pictures almost immediately after the wheels leave the ground. The first subjects in his viewfinder are the colourful containers stacked up on the docks at Hernesaari, in the West Harbour.
      As breathtakingly beautiful and curious as Arthus-Bertrand's images are, he points out that he is not really in search of the unique or the unusual, but rather things that have a universal quality about them, that are beautiful in the eyes of all beholders.
      And this is so even when his lens catches an Iraqi tank graveyard in Kuwait, the rusting hulks of oil tankers, the grey apartment blocks of the abandoned city of Priapat near Chernobyl, or perhaps the eery radiance of an illuminated Finnish greenhouse against a snowy background (see link).
      Arthus-Bertrand hopes that showing off the beauty of the planet will stir people to realise that it cannot and must not be damaged or destroyed.
     
A map of the coastline has been inspected to see where the team are flying later on. Arthus-Bertrand wants to go where the archipelago is at its most beautiful. And where the Baltic Sea is most in its own image.
      "When you talk about the Baltic, is this what you mean?"
      Our pass over the city is coming to an end. The chopper turns towards the Glass Palace. Arthus-Bertrand wants to see what his Earth from Above exhibit looks like - from above.
      "Yes, I want a shot of the map."
     
The helicopter wheels and hovers  over the square behind the 1930s Functionalist building. In the midst of Arthus-Bertrand's 120 photos, the large map of the world can be made out.
      People are walking on it.
      In stockinged feet, carefully.
     
     
Yann Arthus-Bertrand: Earth from Above - Portrait of Our Living Planet, Glass Palace Inner Yard. Open day and night until 18.9.2005. Free Admission.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 19.6.2005

More on this subject:
 World map spread out in Kamppi square

Links:
  Yann Arthus-Bertrand
  Earth from Above: A selection of stunning images of the planet from the air
  An image from an earlier visit to Finland by Yann Arthus-Bertrand

KATI SINISALO / Helsingin Sanomat
kati.sinisalo@sanoma.fi