The photography exhibition is based on Olli Philippe Lautenbacher’s book La ville sans nom – Stadin kulkija – Translated Images (Musta Taide); the book will be launched at the exhibition opening at Laterna Magica’s Tile and Cellar galleries on October 27, 2026, at 5 p.m.

Olli Philippe Lautenbacher's photobook is an urban journey that combines black-and-white street photography with image-based reflections. It aims to explore how photographs are received, read, and understood, and the various ways in which images can be articulated through language. The texts are provided in three languages; however, they are not direct translations of one another—instead, each offers a unique "translation" of the image. Consequently, readers may form slightly different impressions of the work as a whole: what appears to one person as a documentary project might be experienced by another as a more abstract, artistic endeavor. Ultimately, the book seeks to raise questions regarding the diversity and complexity involved in translating, interpreting, or verbalizing images, as well as the blurred boundary between documentary and artistic photography. At the center of this project lies a challenge to the assumptions that reading images is a straightforward, self-evident process, and that describing them is a simple, one-dimensional task.

Visual communication as well ast the interplay between (photo)graphic imagery and text has always been at the heart of Olli Philippe Lautenbacher’s artistic and professional work. He is a university lecturer in translation, specializing in audiovisual translation, multimodal communication, and the relationships between image and text. Before moving into the fields of language and translation studies, he completed a bachelor’s degree in film and audiovisual communication in France. He has also previously published a work in French, Archipels (published by éléments de langage, Brussels, 2018), which also explores the combination of imagery and text.

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