Tatu Gustafsson

The birth of writing is linked to the control of food surpluses in the large urban centres of what is known as the Fertile Crescent and is therefore closely linked to economic and political power. The alphabet was only in the hands of a privileged caste, which soon used writing as a technology for controlling the population.
The emergence of photography was a great scientific and technical milestone with no connection to art. It was only over time that its creative possibilities were discovered. However, as in the case of the alphabet, it became a technology of control, surveillance and punishment. It is worth remembering Alphonse Bertillon's spoken portraits, which were initially used to identify wrongdoers and criminals and later became the national identity card. Today, all citizens carry their police record in their wallets. Recording cameras in public spaces, facial recognition algorithms, and data mining on the social networks of surveillance capitalism form a hyper-panopticon of total control. Of course, they will tell us that it is always for the benefit of our security, and we will go through life happier.

I on the Road/Weather Camera Self-Portraits, Tatu Gustafsson's work consists of 200 self-portraits taken with weather monitoring cameras. Since Gustafsson began taking self-portraits in 2012, he has focused on an alternative approach to photography and has attempted to question the issues of authorship associated with traditional photography. Early on, he discovered that traffic and weather cameras in Finland take a photo every twelve minutes and store it online for 24 hours. Gustafsson embarked on a road trip across the country, positioning himself in front of more than 700 outdoor cameras and accepting the lack of control inherent in this process. The result is haunting images that capture the essence of loneliness and a liberating creative process that plays against the machinery of control.
The title of his series is a nod to Jack Kerouac's legendary Beat Generation novel On the Road, which, with its spontaneous prose and frenetic pace, describes a romantic and bohemian life in 1950s America, where the road trip becomes a symbol of freedom and escape.  The car, a machine that has become capital for the enslavement of the wage earner and for the assimilation of capitalist values as a machine of escape and autonomy.
Are images and words our panopticon or the sheets tied to the bars of our cell?