ABSTRACT
National identities are co-ordinated, often largely defined, by ‘legends and landscapes’, by stories of golden ages, enduring traditions, heroic deeds and dramatic destinies located in ancient or promised home-lands with hallowed sites and scenery. Site and space, political and spiritual identity, are complexly inter-woven. This chapter critically evaluates photographic work from Nordic and Baltic areas that relates to land, landscape, environment, cultural identity and nationalist discourses. It evaluates contemporary practices in Scandinavia, the Baltic States, and Finland. The Nordic and Baltic region barely figures in mainstream histories, let alone histories of photography. In 1996 Estonian artist, Jaan Toomik, made a video installation, ‘Dancing Home’, in which, to a continuous drumbeat, he dances on the ferry deck from Helsinki to Tallinn. Until the early nineteenth century, Sweden and Denmark operated as major imperial states.
