By a restored stream – portraits for a Loimu career story in Oulu

I photographed the portraits of senior inspector Maare Marttila for a career story in Loimu, the magazine of the Finnish union for the natural, environmental and forest sciences, where she looks back on twenty years of work on migratory fish and harnessed waters. We chose a restored stream in Ainolanpuisto in Oulu, exactly the kind of site the story is about.

Marttila works in the water management department of the regional agency for Lapland, and her remit covers the restoration of dammed rivers and regulated lakes and the living conditions of migratory fish. The subject is hard to show in a photograph: the fish are under water, and the work happens in expert networks and in steering projects.

So I photographed her by the water. Stones and gravel have been laid into the stream bed, and the shallow spring current breaks the light into reflections between them. Marttila sits on a log on the bank and looks into the camera, but the whole restored channel is in the same frame: the stones, the current and the stonework opposite. The interviewee and the subject are in one picture.

The second spot was a small dam. Planks in the slots of the concrete structure set the water level, and a blue railing runs across the foreground. Marttila sits on the edge of the dam, and the structure says without words what the story spells out: these waters are set by people.

The third frame was made between trees. Two trunks frame Marttila and leave the stream and a white footbridge soft behind her, so the setting is present without taking attention from her face. In April the trees had no leaves yet, so the water shows all the way through the trunks.

The pictures ran in the career story in Loimu issue 3/2026. Online it was the portrait between the trees, the picture by the stream and the one at the dam, the same arc the text follows: the person first, then what she does.

Read the whole story: loimu.fi