Titled "Only the Traveler Is Foreign," the collection, at the Juhan Kuus Doc Photo Center in Tallinn's Telliskivi district, brings old, moisture-damaged travel photos new layers of meaning.

The exhibition's title draws on a thought by 19th century Edinburgh novelist and travel writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894): "There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign."

Rohland explained more to "Aktuaalne kaamera": "The picture, the photograph is a representation of an image that is outside you; so I thought that it had happened to it, and along with the notion that when you paint a picture, something inevitably happens that you cannot control; that is outside your reach, and you can either accept it, or you can discard it."

At the heart of the exhibition are travel photographs Rohland took in Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, and Syria back in the 1970s, and originally rooted in the traditions of documentary and travel photography. Over the decades, the moisture damage has added new layers of meaning and poetry to the fading images, opening them up to a variety of interpretations.

The question of the stranger shifts from the subject depicted to the viewer in Rohland's work; the stranger may not be another person or an unfamiliar place, but the one who is looking — with their gaze, knowledge, prejudices, and limitations.

And that was the same choice that I had with these pictures, because what happened is that this intrusion of mould and fungi and humidity spoke to me, made me take prints of them in 1998.

"And I saw that what had happened was actually a kind of a gift from nature, so in that instant decision, it was outside my reach what had happened to them."

"Only the Traveler Is Foreign" is open until Sunday, August 9 at the Juhan Kuusi Dokfoto Keskus on Telliskivi 60a-5.

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