Tuomas Koskialho (b. 1987) is an art & media professional working in the field of contemporary photography.

About

I grew up in a small town in Finland. My father was a carpenter, and my mother stayed home to raise me and my two younger sisters.After upper secondary school, I moved away to study art, specializing in photography. After graduating with a BFA, I began my career as a photojournalist for a local newspaper.Between 2006 and 2018, I worked on photography projects that were exhibited in galleries, museums, and festivals across Europe, Asia, and North America. During those years, I also lived and worked abroad as an artist and freelancer in Bulgaria, South Korea, Germany, Morocco, and Russia, and continued my art studies in Portugal and Belgium.In 2017, I returned to Finland and worked as a Creative Director in the local startup scene. Later, I worked as a Media Producer before founding my own company.I don’t really think of DocuLabs as a company in the traditional sense. It’s simply the framework I use to create projects, work with people I admire, and explore ideas on my own terms.Through DocuLabs, I have worked with talented freelancers and photographers from around the world, publishing print magazines, digital books, lectures, and other creative projects.Independence is one of my core values. I believe strongly in the freedom to think, create, publish, and build things in your own way.DocuLabs is 100% bootstrapped. It has been built without external funding and operates entirely on the revenue it generates.

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Publications

After 100 Years In Portugal (2012)
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In this series, I enter into a dialogue with the work of Portuguese painter José Malhoa (1855–1933), reimagining his century-old compositions through a deliberate inversion of gender. Using a pastiche approach, I replaced his male figures with women and his female figures with men. Even with this reversal – and a hundred years separating the contexts – the images feel uncannily natural, as though untouched by intervention. For me, this subtle continuity speaks to both the shifts and the enduring constructs within our visual and cultural understanding of gender.

After 100 Years In Finland (2014)
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For this series, I draw inspiration from the symbolic world of Finnish painter Hugo Simberg (1873–1917). Simberg’s whimsical, almost naïve figures often veil deeper meditations on mortality, innocence, and the fragility of the human condition. Through a pastiche approach, I reimagined these characters as young people in contemporary Finland – adrift, uncertain, and negotiating the open-ended possibilities before them. Self-discovery, I’ve found, is rarely linear; it can be disordered, hesitant, even chaotic. In a world saturated with choice, the search for identity too often carries a layer of anxiety.

After 100 Years In Morocco (2015)
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After 100 Years in Morocco began as a quiet pursuit of echoes – following Henri Matisse’s (1869–1954) footsteps through Morocco, where he once painted figures in the shadow of societal norms. I retraced those characters, recreating Matisse's century-old portraits through a contemporary lens. The resulting images occupy an ambiguous space, somewhere between intimacy and transaction, beauty and power. I’m drawn to the question of freedom – how it can be both offered and withheld, visible and invisible. Perhaps what I am really asking is not what sex tourism is, but how desire itself travels across time, place, and gaze.

The Significant Other (2016)
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The Significant Other emerged from my time in Russia, shaped by the charged intersection of perception, history, and place. Saint Petersburg has long been called Russia’s “window to the West,” a phrase born in the era of Peter the Great. But windows work in both directions – they frame what we look at, and they also frame how we are seen. I wanted to reverse the gaze, to treat the city not as a portal for Russia to look outward, but as a lens through which I could look inward. On Dumskaya Street – a narrow corridor of bars, neon light, and restless energy – I searched for the essence of the “other” as it exists here. People gathering in this space to revel, to dissolve into music and alcohol, to perform joy or to temporarily set aside their troubles.