Heikki Kaski - Tranquillity

Finnish photographer Heikki Kaski shot the images for this photobook in a small town called Tranquillity, located in Central Valley, California. Hot and dusty, with junk piled in empty lots and run-down buildings, it seems to be a typically quiet place in the middle of nowhere, resigned to its own character. Yet in the people Kaski portrays, one can sense an underlying tension. Their faces are rarely divulged covered by hair, turned away or blasted in white light so we are forced to read their bodies and postures, or to look for signs in the birds swirling overhead, the gnarled trees and dried grasses, the patient dogs. Tranquillity won the Unseen Amsterdam dummy award in 2013.