Finnish Sisters Recreate Their Childhood Memories

Don’t you love all those photographs your parents took of you and your siblings growing up? Well, maybe you didn’t at the time… but Wilma Hurskainen did and after she became a professional photographer, she decided to recreate images her father took of his 4 daughters before they grew up.

In the past few years, recreating images from the past has been popular – but Wilma’s photos are unique because they are all existing family images that she re-took in a period of just two years. Dressing as close as the sisters could to the original photograph, while imitating the posture and emotions they expressed back then, are details which make the photos especially fun. Wilma hopes that in making the images so similar, they will transcend time.

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“I have always been very attracted by the photograph’s ability to cross time and create this kind of comparisons,” she says. “There is something sad, almost tragic, about looking at old photographs compared to new ones and seeing how people and things have changed or grown up. After all, it is said that time has been accepted as a common means of measuring life because people are not able nor willing to see the change in themselves. In the pictures it seems as if we were trying to go back to our childhood by adopting the same position towards each other and the photographer’s/spectator’s gaze but we unavoidably fail. We have to fail – there is no return in time.”

Getting her four sisters to come out and participate wasn’t always easy in the beginning, but being the oldest sister and through consistent convincing, they all came out for the shots. In the end, the photos became a book, which was well received in their home country of Finland.

To read more about Wilma, her book and her photography, click here

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