Steeped in a careful study of painting

For photographic artist Elina Brotherus, the dominance of content has given way to an interest in form, writes Aidan Dunne.

Is photography the new painting? Certainly the old debate about whether photography could be considered art has gone by the board. It has been rendered irrelevant by the veritable avalanche of photography that has overwhelmed the art world in the past few decades. The highly regarded young Finnish photographic artist Elina Brotherus has underlined the point by titling her current touring exhibition of photographs and video The New Painting. The show opens at the Temple Bar Gallery tomorrow, and Brotherus herself will be in the gallery to talk about her work at 5pm today.

Her use of the title is, on the face of it, a bold act of appropriation. After all, while it was still a fledgling technology, photography was widely thought to signal the end of painting. But things have not quite worked out that way. While drifting in and out of critical favour, painting has proved remarkably resilient as an art form. Photography, meanwhile, has gone from strength to strength, though in unpredictable ways. Its much-vaunted claim to veracity has been repeatedly and comprehensively undermined, for example.

More recently, exponential developments in photographic technology have meant that, as David Bailey puts it, mediocrity now looks good. These and other factors have encouraged photographers, or perhaps one should say photographic artists, to drastically reassess their own medium. Brotherus can be seen as one of these artists. In the monograph accompanying her exhibition, she is quoted as saying that she took the idea for the title of book and show from a conversation with Iceland's "art ambassador", Edda Jonsdottir, who first asserted to her that photography was the new painting.

"By this," Brotherus comments, "I believe she meant that photographers today can address the same questions that earlier had been the privilege of painters."

This is absolutely true. One can see it happening in the work of many photographers, across a wide spectrum of approaches, including those employed in the work of Jeff Wall, Andreas Gursky, Rineke Dijkstra, Stephen Shore, Nan Goldin, Simon Norfolk and Paul Seawright, to take a fairly random cross-section.

Yet, the ascendency of photography in the art galleries has not meant the eclipse or replacement of painting. Instead, something intriguing has happened, as a new generation of artists engages with the history of painting. A huge amount of current photographic work is rooted in a fruitful dialogue with the language of painting. Often, it has directed us to look again at the richness of a visual tradition to which we tend to pay lip service. The recent Tom Hunter show at Green on Red, with its contemporary reworkings of themes from classical paintings, is a case in point.

Brotherus's work, too, is steeped in a careful study of painting. She was born in Helsinki in 1972 and initially studied analytical chemistry. However, once qualified, she decided that her future lay in some other discipline. Without feeling strongly motivated in that direction, she applied to do a photographic degree and was, fortuitously she says, accepted. Her early work, up to about 1999, was intensely autobiographical and self-analytical. From then on she has been much more aware of the whole business of making pictures. As she puts it, the dominance of content gave way to an interest in form.

Her observation of paintings in European museums has fed into her photographs in direct and indirect ways since 1999. Most directly, perhaps, is her extraordinary series inspired by Casper David Friedrich's iconic Romantic landscape painting Wanderer Above the Mists. Brotherus - who is her own model, most of the time - stands in for the wanderer, against a variety of landscapes, including one verdant, Italian one. Another Italian image positions her as a sleeping Venus in a rolling landscape but Italy is, on the whole, an exceptional setting. She is very much a Northern artist, and seems at home with the light and colours of the Nordic world.

Like many photographic artists, she uses a large-format camera. Her work, she says, is not technically demanding, but her compositions are carefully made and her ability to capture light and atmosphere is exceptional. She has a knack for devising highly formalised, beautifully poised images - though not always, it must be said, as sometimes the awkwardness of a particular pose or setting is a bit too much. But her best photographs are extraordinary, with an uncanny, otherworldly atmosphere. She seems happiest, most fluent, when she is both model and photographer herself, or when photographing uninhabited landscapes.

She lists "light, colour, composition, representations of the human figure and the space" as being central to her concerns and "fundamental in all visual art." While she specifically quotes Friedrich, usually her painterly references are more oblique. Her series of Bathers is partly inspired by Cezanne's many paintings on the theme. Her figures in domestic interiors evoke Vermeer and Bonnard without slavishly attempting to recreate the visual style of either. As well as Classicism in general, the northern European tradition of landscape painting is surely a major underlying influence. Perhaps the most surprising thing about The New Painting is its unmistakable affinity with the old.

The New Painting: Elina Brotherus is at Temple Bar Gallery until July 15. The book, Elina Brotherus: The New Painting (Next Level, £19.95) is available at the gallery