Kosti Ruohomaa by Bonner-Ganter Deanna;

Author:Bonner-Ganter, Deanna;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4586740
Publisher: Down East Books

When in Dublin, in an unusual picture series, Ruohomaa’s camera documented ale processing at the Guinness stout brewery. His photographs and captions explain the step-by-step handmade process of making the rich, distinctively flavored, dark ale from its barley base to the “cooperage,” to “blazing the cask,” in sometimes dramatic pictures, praised years later by Black Star’s Howard Chapnick.9

In the countryside Ruohomaa turned the Linhof view camera to clay homes set under heavily thatched roofs, peasants at work in potato fields, and to a landscape seamed with stone walls. He located the poet William Butler Yeats’s widow, at her place of work, a bindery of special books, and his daughter, an abstract painter, in her studio. But most significantly he found and made a portrait of Yeats’s dear friend, Maud Gonne, then eighty-two years old, in the sitting room of her home. Yeats, many years before, had written a poem to Maud Gonne, “When You Are Old.”

To photograph the re-interment of William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), a poet whom Ruohomaa personally esteemed, would be a high moment of the Ireland visit. Life’s editors titled the essay, “After Years in a Foreign Grave, Yeats Comes Home Again to Ireland.” The layout incorporated views of Yeats’s grave in the ancient churchyard of County Sligo along with the surrounding landscape, with selected lines that included his words describing this final gravesite.10 Ruohomaa composed one scene of the revered Drumcliff Cemetery so that the burial site rested under the silhouetted crest of Ben Bulben in the distant background. Yeats died in southern France, but due to the war, it took nine years to bring him back to his own country.

Ruohomaa continued on to Copenhagen, Denmark, and Stockholm, Sweden, where he did a piece for Holiday magazine on the skiing history museum, “Svenska Skidmuseet,” with views that documented the rustic museum site and illustrated forms of antique skis.11

Early in July, Ruohomaa arrived in Helsinki, Finland. His first pictures appeared that month in Europe’s Illustrated. He emphasized to Black Star the importance of Miina Sillanpaa (1866–1952), whom he described as a “great Finnish patriot.” “Sillanpaa was a leader for women’s rights and was responsible for a woman’s right to vote becoming law in Finland, in 1907. He noted, “A member of Parliament since that time, Miina Sillanpaa represented the best in Finnish democracy.”12

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