When I arrived in Sysmä, Finland, two months ago, my friend Janne welcomed me to the darkness. He probably knows — apart from a year in Southampton, where we carried out an extensive zythological study together, he has been living in rural Finland all his life. And yes, autumn is very dark here. On the winter solstice, dawn only came after nine o’clock in the morning. Just after three in the afternoon, it was pitch-dark again. The sun never climbed much higher than the horizon, gifting photographers a permanent golden hour. That’s when the colours of rural Finland are at its most beautiful: the birch forest covered with a layer of powdered sugar, the golden wheat fields, the shimmering water of the lakes, whether frozen over or not.
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