Eeva Mäkinen

Within a remote region of Finland, Eeva Mäkinen creates inspiring landscapes and studies of this unique wilderness. Keith Wilson discovers why autumn is her favourite time of year, winter is the season for wide-angles, and why she hikes with four bottles of gin in her backpack...

- Eeva Mäkinen

Summer has arrived early in Kuusamo, a small town in Finland’s northeast, close to the Russian border. Here, the winters are long and bitterly cold, but the attractions of snow-covered trees, frozen lakes, and the Northern Lights make it a popular destination for landscape photographers from the world over.

It’s 8 pm on 1 June when I speak to Eeva Mäkinen, who is sitting outside, listening to the local birdsong near the lakeside where she lives. “It’s a beautiful evening here,” she says happily. “The summer came around one and a half weeks early. Usually this time of the year we might still have some ice on the lakes, but now as I’m sitting on our own lake shore, the trees have leaves already and it’s really summery 20 degrees!”

Eeva and her boyfriend Mikko moved here in 2019 from Helsinki, Finland’s capital, and she finds daily inspiration in this wilderness on the edge of Lapland. “Last year when we were living in southern Finland and we were deciding what to do, I noticed that, out of the nine months that we lived there, I was in Lapland for six months; so the decision was kind of obvious.”

Having moved closer to where her work was actually taking her, Eeva and Mikko now have every intention of staying put – the couple have nearly finished building their own home in the forest by the lake…

Nature is your first love. Was photography also an interest for you as a child, or did that develop later on?