ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Imaginary Homecoming, the work of the contemporary Finnish photographer Jorma Puranen. Imaginary Homecoming is an expressive re-engagement, repositioning and renegotiation of such historical images. It represents a dynamic articulation of history as a continuing dialogue between past and present concerns. Prince Roland Bonaparte's Sami photographs, taken by his secretary M. G. Roche, are in many ways different from other sets of anthropological images that he had made, in that they were the result of travelling and working in the region. Imaginary Homecoming faces complex and ambiguous dilemmas of this kind. Yet, as Robert Pujade has argued, the aesthetic quality itself also works towards the destruction of ethnocentrism. In the installation 'performances' of Imaginary Homecoming the photographs themselves are actually enclosed in space, an inversion of photography's usual spatial relationship, the images refiguring in each space.
