Harri Kallio’s Art: Part Photography, Part Biology

Artist Harri Kallio photographs wildlife dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History then covers the film negatives with soil and moisture, and waits

By Jennifer Wehunt // Art by Harri Kallio
Wildlife Photos
Dec 17, 2025

WHEN THE ARTIST HARRI KALLIO WAS GROWING UP IN FINLAND, he’d see nature “all over the place,” including meeting “very large moose face-to-face.” Living in Brooklyn, however, he mostly encounters people. “And nine times out of ten, I see someone on the street, they’re looking at their phones,” he says. “It’s a new accepted form of existing, which is peculiar.” Even as we’re engrossed in our devices, bombarded by images, Kallio says photography is losing its oomph: “It doesn’t have the power it used to have. It’s everywhere, constantly.” To create something fresh from the old medium, he experiments with what he calls photography-based biological processing. For the ongoing series “World of Disappearing: The Collective Memory of Wild Things,” including the 2024 work “Stag Night Call” (above), he photographs dioramas in New York’s American Museum of Natural History. He then takes the film negatives, covers them with soil and moisture, and waits various amounts of time. “It’s basically a living thing,” he says of the microbe-treated, often hole-ridden results. “There’s always more and more of nature instead of the mechanical image. It’s biological. It’s changing constantly”—as is wildlife, nature, our world, he says. See more of Kallio's work.