Talk:Ismo Hölttö

One of the greatest?

We now read:

According to the blurb of his self-published photograph book, Ismo Hölttö is considered one of the greatest Finnish photographers of all time.

(my emphasis). That's one of the most damning pieces of praise I've ever read. I think it would be kinder (and no less informative about his photography) if we just cut the whole sentence. But I hesitate to do that, as the sentence is merely the first half of a paragraph whose second half is:

The combination of his natural talent, social skills and the special time in history when he photographed his portraits resulted in photography that is also exceptional from an international point of view.

This too is hagiographic and vague. No source for it is given, and I fear that it too is sourced from the same blurb (which I suppose is from the book that's illustrated). Is it, and if so, could we just cut the whole paragraph?

Incidentally, I was fairly impressed by the content as well as size of Hölttö's monster book when I spotted it during a very quick visit to Helsinki in 2006. (I don't have either of these books or anything else by Hölttö.) Unfortunately I know very little about Finnish photographers, but surely the "greatest" include I. K. Inha, whose work really is first-rate by any standard. -- Hoary (talk) 23:47, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

I think your points are well made. I have no doubt his work is important. What would be best would be if there were an evaluation that was not from his own book. I suppose I have now volunteered to try and find one... ;-) In the meantime, feel free to comment the paragraph hidden. -- Cimon Avaro; on a pogostick. (talk) 23:54, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Spoken like a gentleman! (But then, who else would be riding a pogostick?) -- Hoary (talk) 00:36, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

The situation is in fact very good. I found a site that is advertising a coming co-retrospective by him and a fellow classic documentary photographer of the same era by a respected exhibitor "Kaapeli", so besides their third party evaluation that I have worked into the article, there will likely be loads of unbiased evaluations in finnish media next autumn. (The retrospective is held September to January) -- Cimon Avaro; on a pogostick. (talk) 08:26, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Good. I'm afraid I'm going to be rather busy for some weeks, but I do want to write about Inha at some time. If you see nothing by June, prod me (with your pogo stick of course). -- Hoary (talk) 10:02, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

That 2008 book exists, honest.

In a recent amplification of the article, I derived a lot from Elina Heikka's "The decisive moment of introducing oneself", a preface/essay within Ismo Hölttö, Valokuvia = Photographs (or perhaps I should write Ismo Hölttö: Valokuvia = Ismo Hölttö: Photographs).

I found a copy of this book looked within it, and followed what I read, honest.

But I can understand that people might have trouble believing this. After all, the book seems unknown to Worldcat.

The book is listed in a very few places. It's mentioned at the foot of this page about a retrospective exhibition. But the best evidence for its existence that I can find right now is this page in which some retailer offers a signed copy for €95 (and says the book weighs 2.6 kg). I suppose that the page will disappear when the one copy is sold, but I've submitted it to Webcite; you'll find an ugly copy (CSS seems not to have been scraped up) here. -- Hoary (talk) 09:00, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Hölttö's website, or not

The list of external links includes a Wayback scrape of (much of) what's described as Hölttö's website. However, the website is only in English; and while the occasional description of Hölttö that I've read tend to call him modest, this website is quite openly promotional. I tend to think that it's instead a website made for him by others, to accompany some particular exhibition or similar. But I don't know. There's probably an opportunity for research here, at least for those lucky people who can read Finnish. -- Hoary (talk) 09:00, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Help, please!

I've tried hard with this article, but the great majority of the potential sources that I know of are in Finnish, and I can't read Finnish. (And no, I am not going to trust Google Translate or similar.) Kotivalo and Cimon Avaro, you can read Finnish; do please consider doing a little work on this article. I think Hölttö's work merits it. -- Hoary (talk) 09:00, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Sander

I've just reverted addition of a link to what thereby became [[August Sander]]'s ''[[Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts]]''. That gave the impression that there was an article about Menschen.... No such article exists. The subject certainly merits an article: Matthiaspaul, perhaps you would like to create it? -- Hoary (talk) 23:18, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Removing the link is not helpful. The whole point of adding the link was to build up more momentum and to start creating some infrastructure around a future article on the topic, also to improve reverse lookup and for better interwiki-cross-linking. I may work on the article myself at some point in time, but still have a lot of other (unrelated) stuff prepared to spool out before I will find time for this. Since "Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts" is a so called link with possibilities (as properly indicated by the usage of the {{R with possibilities}} rcat in the redirect) and also because it now points to what currently is a subsection in the Sander article, the nearby Sander link is not redundant (and perfectly okay per our guidelines). Also, I have added a detailed list of works around the "Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts" project to the Sander article, so deliberately pointing the reader there is of actual benefit for anyone interested in the project for as long as the dedicated article does not exist. I have, however, rearranged the link sligthly by adding an interwiki-link to the already existing article in the German WP, also to avoid a sea of blue. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 17:25, 8 June 2021 (UTC)