FINANCIAL TIMES: By Francis Hodgson. A Pentti Sammallahti retrospective is the stand-out at the Arles photography festival.Pentti Sammallahti is a Finnish photographer who represents the coming together of two rather old-fashioned tendencies.

A traveller specialised in the far north, he makes toned black-and-white prints that are never specifically about anything much. He’s a reporter on the human condition rather than on any particular subset of it. But he’s really an “auteur” photographer, to borrow a term from the cinema. He makes pictures that are the expression of his sensitivity and of his mood – a kind of work that has been somewhat eclipsed by the more project-based photography we’re familiar with and which is designed to fit into books. Sammallahti’s pictures are exquisitely beautiful according to the old canons: they have rich tones, elegant proportions, subtle and revealing compositions. To dig out another old word, they are Pictorialist images, in which the object itself is a thing of beauty, and not only the sights it describes. Sammallahti is a prodigious book-maker and has published a number of monographs. It is a pleasure, therefore, to find that his original prints make up the stand-out exhibition among the 50-plus at this year’s Arles photography festival.

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