My Weather Diary is a meditation on cycles. With his daily photographs, Jari Silomäki tracks the rotation of weeks and years, of snow and rain, of books read and new relationships. Elections come and go, ice melts, school starts and old cars stop running. These revolutions swirl together and have the inevitable ebb and flow of the tide.

Silomäki frames the weather as an analogy for the news. Though we experience daily fluctuations in climate as particular to our geographic location, local weather is shaped by a global system. This entanglement is noted in a previous exhibition at the Finnish Museum of Photography, “As the news cycle and Silomäki’s personal life intertwine, geographical distances lose their meaning. When the project began over 20 years ago, the weather was not a politically charged issue. In our time, every atmospheric change is seen through the lens of the climate crisis.”

This is the first time My Weather Diary has taken on this particular shape, with decades of history spooling along the wall. It brings to mind a timeline; the works are generally in chronological order, but not rigidly so. The form also borrows a bit from a musical score, with overlapping harmonies and years of life transcribed into irregular bars and measures.

Why should we pay so much attention to one life, and to old news, especially when the current news is so pressing and overwhelming? My Weather Diary may add to the weight of what we’re already carrying. But it can be grounding to see time compressed, to see from inside one person’s experience of the world, over decades of time within the longer arc of world events. The project brings some questions to the surface:

How much of the daily news can we hold inside at one time?

How does the media affect one’s psyche?

How shall we spend the hours of our daily lives?

And to what should we give our internal space?

When a picture shows a slice of family life and also tells of a world tragedy, will we attend to one or the other? This is a choice many feel right now. And the answer is not a clear one.

My Weather Diary 2001 – ongoing (2051)

Since 2001, I have been taking a landscape photograph every day. I connect these photographs to important personal or world political events. These images link personal human relationships and terrorist attacks, bringing up children and genocide, the smell of coffee and the global economy. At present, My Weather Diary comprises thousands of photographs and constitutes a continuous process; hence, all the exhibitions on this topic have been different. The starting point of this work was that world events, personal events and weather will always repeat themselves and merge into one large continuum. Connecting landscapes with the news also concretizes how we are in contact with world events through the media. Everything is brought up close, which also means that events that are truly nearby are no longer close.

The My Weather Diary series has been shown at many exhibitions all over the world, including the 14th Biennale of Sydney (2004), the Belgrade Biennale (2006), the Seventh Biennial of African Photography in Bamako (2007), the MoMA PS1 in New York (2008), the independent curatorial space in St Petersburg, as part of the Manifesta 10 Festival (2014) and the D-Museum, Seoul (2018).

https://jarisilomaki.com

Jari Silomäki (1975) graduated from the Turku Academy of Arts’ photography program (BA) in 2001 and from the University of Art and Design (MA) in 2007. Silomäki was awarded the Finnish State Prize for Photography in 2017. Silomäki’s works have been exhibited in Finland and abroad. This includes an extensive solo exhibition at the Museum of Photography in Finland; Sydney Biennale, MCA Australia; MoMa P.S.1, New York and D– Museum, Seoul.