Browsing his work leaves the impression that Noorits has seemingly lived several lives, sometimes parallel to each other and sometimes in periods. He has addressed several topics that have earned the time and attention they deserve. The author has succeeded in establishing himself and developing his unique style, making his pictures instantly recognisable as his work. 40 years of Noorits’ photography! What exactly?

Nature and abstractions

Noorits, who has been educated as a biologist, has always photographed nature. It is one of these “lives” existing in parallel, which surfaces once in a while and then fades into the background again. Nature finds its way into the background landscapes, into the staged works, or takes on a life of its own. The traditional nature photo has given birth to Noorits’ abstractionism, of which the best known are reflections and playing with colour and form, represented in may exhibitions and artist’s calendars. Pastoral nature and the primal connection between people and nature are also evident from his female nudes.

Noorits as a crisis and war reporter

This is a genre that deserves to be addressed on its own. War and the Defence Forces are inseparable parts of the artist as a person. Noorits has been on missions in Kosovo and Afghanistan and taken pictures in different crisis zones. As a documentary genre, in many senses war photography contradicts everything else Noorits has been engaged with as an artist. It can even be said that in a sense it contradicts the whole modern anti-war artistic creed, which provides another important clue to understanding the artist’s vision. It is likely that visiting crisis zones has taught decisiveness to Noorits and lent him the quick thinking that is characteristic of a documentary photographer.

Staged works and nudes

The significance of the naked female body in Estonian and Soviet photography of the 1970s and 1980s is difficult to comprehend today. It was at the same time a metaphor, an object of desire and a sign of rebellion: semi-underground nude photography was something where fighting the system was written into it from the start. Respect and even a certain reverence before the female body can be felt in all the works in the black-and-white period of Tõnu Noorits. Later, in the 1990s, the author’s interpretation of the naked body even takes a psychedelic turn with the colours and collage technique used. In the modern era of perfection—where we have Photoshop, powerful lighting set-ups and special effects—the pure nude photo seems like a thing from the past, but more fascinating is the playfulness expressed by Noorits in the early 2000s. This playfulness, however, was preluded by the exercises of “manual Photoshop” in the darkroom and the level achieved that the author can be proud of even today.

The naked body has remained the central narrative of the staged photographs by Noorits in all his creative periods, once seen as tender and intimate, then again through the eyes of a rough alpha male, through special techniques or as ironic madness.

Farewell to Socialism

The fact that Noorits’ series Farewell to Socialism has received so little attention in Estonia can be regarded as one of the greatest gaps in the story of Estonian photography. In the late 1980s, this series sparked particular interest in Europe, being, on the one hand, a bold prophecy and, on the other, the artist’s masterful interpretation of an era of strange changes. It seems like the same era that gave this series to the world also took it back with the arrival of the new state, new currency and new beauty standards. Fear of that which had been allowed the work to be forgotten in Estonia, as everyone was busy rebuilding their lives according to the rules of a capitalist society. The memory of the past was still too fresh—people would rather forget than remember the dead-end system. The author completed the first images of Farewell to Socialism in the mid-1980s, and it came together as a whole in the second half of the 1980s when the time and situation had matured sufficiently. The exhibition quickly caught the attention of those outside Estonia and has been displayed in many countries, from Australia to Argentina, and in Hungary Farewell to Socialism won a FIAP gold medal and a special prize for Noorits.

Tartu

The time and place of coming of age are very important factors in considering the work of Noorits. Tartu in the 1970s and 1980s was, on the one hand, provincial, but also a town with a strong sense of conciousness and community. Young artists from Tartu - lmar Kruusamäe, Andrus Kasemaa, Miljard Kilk, Ervin Õunapuu, and Enn Tegova in particular - occupy an important place in Noorits’s social circle. Somewhere in the same scene lurks Matti Milius, with his crazy endeavours, who gave Noorits the opportunity to shoot what was likely to be the first performance show in Estonia. Tõnu Noorits works his medium with the same level of dedication that other artists lend to paint and canvas, obtaining high-level darkroom and retouching skills, which makes him an anti-photographer in his own way. There is a certain conceptual component that remains atypical of Estonian photography. This is the most evident in his works from the 1990s and 2000s, where black and white darkroom techniques have been replaced by digital collage. This era reached its peak in the first part of the 1990s, when Noorits and Silver Vahtre formed the creative collective KYNA, from whose drawing board came the famous Plats puhtaks (Clear the place) for the electoral alliance Isamaa. During this time, the artist’s manner of expression changed and the appearance of a so-called commercial element in his work seems like a breath of fresh air.

Final words

Tõnu Noorits is an interesting phenomenon in Estonia’s artistic photography scene, and there is no doubt that his work deserves broader attention. He has managed to steer away from the main roads of Estonian art and do his own thing, with a certain vision that was not always understood. It seems that Noorits is placed in somewhat of a grey, hard-to-define area. To artists, he is a photographer, and to photographers, he is an artist; in Tartu, he is a city slicker, and in the capital, he is a country boy.

Haus Gallery has cooperated with the new Web magazine Edasi (in English Forward) (Edasi.org) for 5 months. In the weekly column we talk about something interesting and noteworthy in the field of art to Estonian readers. The Forward way of thinking, positive world view, intelligent journey with the reader through meaningful moments, slow journalism, which offers counterpoise to the racy information barrage, which invites to stop, feel and think along just as art inspires Haus Gallery to write stories for Forward.