We Are Nature

Artist: Christoffer Relander
Theme: Earth & Nostalgia

Christoffer Relander is a Finnish art photographer whose work sits quietly between the real and the imagined. His images do not announce themselves. They linger. They blur edges. They invite you to look again.

“Reality can be beautiful, but the surreal often absorbs me. Photography to me is a way to express and stimulate my imagination. Nature is simply the world.”

Relander is known for his in-camera multiple exposures, a practice that resists excess and leans into trust. Portrait and landscape meet inside the lens. A silhouette fills with branches. Hands gather frost. A forest rests in glass. Nothing feels forced. Nothing feels decorative. The technique is integral to the thought: human and earth are not separate subjects, but shared matter.

Across his work, nature is never treated as scenery. It is presence. It is identity. In series like MonoNature, human forms carry leaves, bark, sky. The images feel porous, as though the body is borrowing from the land or remembering it. There is no urgency here, just recognition.

In Jarred & Displaced, that recognition turns inward. Landscapes from Relander’s childhood in Finland appear inside glass jars, layered through double exposure. Trees, reeds, entire forests held gently, almost reverently. The works carry nostalgia, but also unease. Preservation, after all, is never neutral. What we try to keep is often what we are already losing.

What threads through these bodies of work is not sentimentality, but responsibility. Relander’s photographs acknowledge fragility without dramatising it. They hold space for care.

“My work speaks to Earth… Through in-camera double exposures, I merge people with landscapes to show that we’re not separate from nature — we are nature.”

It’s this clarity that makes Earth Vyne a natural alignment.

“I chose Earth because nature is at the core of my work and identity. What resonated with Vyne is how it values truth over trends, creating space for personal stories to grow into cultural conversations.”

Relander’s work does not perform. It does not persuade. It simply stays with you. In Earth Vyne, his photographs live as quiet reminders of connection, of dependence, of a world that is not outside us, but within reach, and worth protecting.