Dear friend of Arkadia, You are welcome to the bookshop on Wednesday 1.12 at 6pm. Novelist Juha Itkonen and photographer Curt Richter will talk about how they develop and define characters in their different media. Both artists are interested and influenced by a variety art forms and they will talk about what they look for and consider when we are working on new projects and ideas. What do they find and bring to their work from other medias and social structures. They will also discuss their collaboration here in Helsinki, “Still And All”, which combines photographic portraits with short stories. The dialogue will be open to questions from the audience. The talk will be in English but questions can be asked in Finnish as well. Warm regards, Ian  www.arkadiabookshop.fi – Entrance is free and green tea will be served. A donation of €2 (or more!) is suggested and would be very welcome. “Still And All “ is a project combining fictional biographies with photographic portraits, putting the two together into a singular visual context. A viewer looks at a portrait and then reads the adjoining biography which is in fact, fictional.   The idea is to question the assumptions we make as viewers and readers when looking at an image or text. The project began as a collaboration between the Key West Literary Seminar and The Studios of Key West in conjunction with the seminar’s 2009 topic “Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth”.Eighteen portraits ranging from house painters to Poet Laureates taken by Curt Richter the previous year in Key West were given to different writers, including Ann Beattie, Judy Blume, Tina Chang, Bret Lott, Robert D. Richardson, who then wrote fictional biographies. The photographs and the text were displayed together and it was only when the viewer read the exhibition catalogue that they learned that the biographies were false.   Juha Itkonen, the Finnish novelist, and Curt Richter met in Key West and agreed it would be interesting to continue the project in Helsinki. Finland’s literary heritage is as rich as the country’s classical music. The Finnish exhibition will include portraits by Curt Richter with literary contributions by Kari Hotakainen, Anna-Leena Härkönen, Riku Korhonen, Miika Nousiainen, Sofi Oksanen, Leena Lehtolainen, Mikko Rimminen and Sinikka Vuola either in text or as subjects. Exhibition venues are being proposed in Europe and the USA along with a book. Each panel is 36”x18” (90cm x 45cm) mounted in a black frame. Both the print and the text paper are floated off the back panel. The photographs are 22”x27”. The text from Key West is printed on U.S. letter (8.5”x11”). The Helsinki text will be printed on A4 (8.27”x11.69”). This text will be in Finnish with a translation in English available in the catalogue Curt Richter Photography www.curtrichter.com Represented by www.gallerystock.com