Kehrer Verlag Hertta Kiiski: Otherworld

Artist Hertta Kiiski’s photobook Otherworld takes you on a journey to the elusive borderlands where dreams and everyday reality intertwine, and where the various life forms on our planet merge into one another. Published by the German art publisher Kehrer Verlag, Otherworld is the third photography book by renowned Finnish artist Hertta Kiiski. The photographs are complemented by Jaakko Pallasvuo’s drawings and texts by Jenna Sutela, Ilari Laamanen and Sini Silveri.

Otherworld dreams of a new affinity between the human and the inhuman, the organic and the inorganic, transforming existing hierarchies. Pictured are familiar yet altered landscapes, plants with eyes, heads levitating in the forest, and eyes depicted on a red-tinted seafloor. Otherworld exists in a framework of youth and love with aspects of the magical, the mythical and the esoteric. Like youth itself, Hertta Kiiski’s photographs inhabit a precarious state between daydream and unrest. The book intertwines the imaginary with the everyday through its selection of photographs ranging from analog snapshots to staged and digitally altered portraits, created over a period of seven years.