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There are photos of stunning natural landscapes and then are portraits of people. There are also photos of people in landscapes. But what happens when a photographer seamlessly blends the person into the landscape and vice versa?

Finnish photographer Wilma Hurskainen takes incredible photographs of women seeming to meld into the landscapes that surround them.

With carefully selected subjects, costumes, poses and light, she creates what almost seems like an illusion; a human transforming into her natural landscape and the panorama in turn becoming one with the human.

Inspired by the concept that nature helps one to seize the moment, Wilma’s Meditations series explores themes of hiding and imitating, two constant elements of her photographic practice, but also goes further, emphasising not only losing the borders within ourselves but also the borders between landscape and portrait photography.

The images for the series were also inspired, as their title would suggest, by the photographer’s own meditative practice, in which she feels connected to her surroundings.

Wilma is a graduate of the Lahti Institute of Design and the University of Art and Design/Aalto University in Helsinki. Her images feature in international collections, including the Helsinki Art Museum and the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Art in Japan.

Her work makes a viewer not only think twice about what they are looking at, but also about the boundaries between art forms and the general beauty that can occur when borders are eliminated and two sides meld together.

About the author

Born and raised in LA, India studied Drama at the University of Southern California before shifting her focus to the visual arts. After moving to London in 2013, she co-founded the iOS app ArtAttack which focused on connecting emerging artistic talent with galleries and collectors. Following that she worked at Albany Arts Communications, a boutique Art PR firm in Fitzrovia before joining Culture Trip. Aside from art and theatre, India's other passions include travel, food, books and dance.

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