Jari Arffman
Works available
Photo art book Checkpoint Tampere - Valokuvataidekirja Checkpoint Tampere (2017)Exhibition catalogue Copyright Tampere - Näyttelyjulkaisu Copyright Tampere (2011)Exhibition catalogue Counterparts - Näyttelyjulkaisu Vastinparit (2007)Photo art book BART - Business Art, Valokuvataidekirja BART - Business Art (2008)Website Bart®Website Documentary Project Tampere I Valokuvataidekirja/Photo book Aito kaupunki - True City (2021)Musta-Pekka goes on Social Art Project, in Finnish (2017)Bart® Archive 2005-2010Bart® Archive 2010-2012Bart® Archive 2012-LAKANA | SHEET Lyhytelokuva/short film (2023)BART Business Art USA web siteBasic information
b. 1965, Kajaani
Photographic artist
Residence: Tampere
Contact information
Phone number: +358 40 7290 480
Email: jari.arffman@bart.fi
Artist’s Statement
“Jari Arffman’s photographs become compositions in the emulation of light and shadow, capturing a passing, the absence of being.
We see lightning before we hear its sound. A bare table left with the remmants of rain glimmering in the light forming patterns on the surface of our imaginations. Arffman uses these traces to subdue the light and bend our attention elsewhere.
Sidewalks wearing its shadows instead of its curbs. We know they are there but they sit beyond our vision. Arffman’s photographs suggest what’s residing behind what we can’t touch. We can smell the scent of the ocean before we reach its shore. It lives on the scents our wanting it to be. Jari Arffman as his best captures these vestiges of want and illuminates his compositions by leading us into moments of the vanished.”
– Timothy Persons, curator of photography and professor, Jari Arffman: Vastinparit / Counterparts, Kajaani art museum publications, Kustannusosakeyhtiö Musta Taide, Hämeenlinna 2007
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Bart®, Business Art is a new, distinctive, individual product name and operating model for documentary photography. I take photographs for private and public organisations of the organisations themselves. These series of black-and-white photographs are high-quality both artistically and in their content, and the organisations put them up on their premises, for instance, in conference rooms and reception areas, and give them as gifts.
Bart® offers both an emotional and an informational way of seeing and understanding the overlapping worlds of the individual and the organisation in a even deeper and broader context, since both the individual and the organisation are attempting to understand what is happening within and around them.
“Bart is a photographic artist’s celebration of work. The company uses art to demonstrate respect for its own work.”
– Asko Mäkelä, Art Historian, Jari Arffman: BART – Business Art, Maahenki Oy, Helsinki 2008
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"Jari Arffman’s art is characterized by various antitheses: he is a realist who documents what he sees without embellishing it and at the same time a romantic who communicates mystical spiritual and mental landscapes. In his photographs, a futuristic mechanical aesthetic meets a lyrical portrayal of nature, and narrativity meets symbolism. Arffman is interested in both the local and the global, the intellectual and the emotional, the conceptual and the concrete, the personal and the generic, otherness and sameness."
– Virpi Nikkari, curator, Tampere Art Museum, Copyright Tampere, Tampere Art Museum publications 151, Sastamala 2011
We see lightning before we hear its sound. A bare table left with the remmants of rain glimmering in the light forming patterns on the surface of our imaginations. Arffman uses these traces to subdue the light and bend our attention elsewhere.
Sidewalks wearing its shadows instead of its curbs. We know they are there but they sit beyond our vision. Arffman’s photographs suggest what’s residing behind what we can’t touch. We can smell the scent of the ocean before we reach its shore. It lives on the scents our wanting it to be. Jari Arffman as his best captures these vestiges of want and illuminates his compositions by leading us into moments of the vanished.”
– Timothy Persons, curator of photography and professor, Jari Arffman: Vastinparit / Counterparts, Kajaani art museum publications, Kustannusosakeyhtiö Musta Taide, Hämeenlinna 2007
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Bart®, Business Art is a new, distinctive, individual product name and operating model for documentary photography. I take photographs for private and public organisations of the organisations themselves. These series of black-and-white photographs are high-quality both artistically and in their content, and the organisations put them up on their premises, for instance, in conference rooms and reception areas, and give them as gifts.
Bart® offers both an emotional and an informational way of seeing and understanding the overlapping worlds of the individual and the organisation in a even deeper and broader context, since both the individual and the organisation are attempting to understand what is happening within and around them.
“Bart is a photographic artist’s celebration of work. The company uses art to demonstrate respect for its own work.”
– Asko Mäkelä, Art Historian, Jari Arffman: BART – Business Art, Maahenki Oy, Helsinki 2008
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"Jari Arffman’s art is characterized by various antitheses: he is a realist who documents what he sees without embellishing it and at the same time a romantic who communicates mystical spiritual and mental landscapes. In his photographs, a futuristic mechanical aesthetic meets a lyrical portrayal of nature, and narrativity meets symbolism. Arffman is interested in both the local and the global, the intellectual and the emotional, the conceptual and the concrete, the personal and the generic, otherness and sameness."
– Virpi Nikkari, curator, Tampere Art Museum, Copyright Tampere, Tampere Art Museum publications 151, Sastamala 2011
Current information
SAM Magazine article 10.4.2025:"From Tampere to the Northeast: How Bart is reinventing cultural exchange between Finland and the U.S."
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The online publication of the photo book True City (2021) 8.8.2024. Earlier the book has been available only as print. See the online publication here.
