A core strand of my scholarship investigates how people engage with images in ordinary, often overlooked contexts. Beginning with my monograph Pictorial Practices in a ‘Cam Era’, I have examined non-professional camera use, sensory experience, and everyday photographic habits. Subsequent edited volumes — including #Snapshot and Digital Photography and Everyday Life — expand this line of inquiry by situating visual practices within broader cultural and technological changes.

More recently, Visual Studies: A Social Scientific Perspective consolidates this trajectory, offering a conceptual framework for understanding images as social, material, and embodied practices. My journal articles complement this work by exploring how images are integral for orientation, recognition, imagination, and affect — from the difficulty of distinguishing photorealistic images from computer-generated ones to the conceptualisation of “the look” as a medium in its own right. Collectively, this research strengthens the theoretical and methodological foundations of visual studies while maintaining a grounded focus on everyday experience.

A second major theme concerns how digital technologies — from smartphones to social media platforms and algorithmic systems — mediate interpersonal communication. I investigate how interfaces, material infrastructures, and institutional constraints shape what and how people share, hide, disclose, or negotiate in mediated contexts.

I have contributed to debates on privacy, automation, and communication management through empirical studies of school platforms such as Wilma, interpersonal practices in social networking services, and the challenges of digital intimacy in contexts like online dating. Collaborative work on mobile digital practices and algorithmic infrastructures examines how computation and automation reshape social life and imagination. Throughout these studies, I foreground the materiality of mediation: the ways interfaces, devices, and data practices complicate assumptions of seamless communication.

A unique and increasingly influential thread in my work explores the entanglements of bodies, documents, and identification technologies. This research spans historical, ethnographic, and contemporary perspectives: from the long history of the Finnish passport to the role of facial recognition and biometric systems in shaping categories of personhood.

Through books, articles, and a major museum exhibition on the passport as a cultural and political artefact, I analyse how bodies and documents co-produce identities, borders, and forms of governance. My work on experimental indices and facial recognition highlights how emerging media assemblages enact new modes of classification, surveillance, and verification. This line of research connects visuality with pressing societal questions around mobility, citizenship, inequality, and technological power.

I contribute to media theory through explorations of elemental media, navigation, the camera, and speculative imaging. Recent publications on navigational images and the “speculative camera” propose new conceptual tools for understanding how media technologies orient people — physically, cognitively, and affectively — within shifting environments.

These contributions situate visual practices within broader ecological and infrastructural conditions, emphasizing how sensing, movement, and environment shape contemporary media experiences. These theoretical developments complement my empirical research by offering wider conceptual frameworks for studying mediation in conditions of uncertainty, automation, and environmental change.

My long-standing curatorial collaborations — including the #snapshot exhibitions, photographic projects presented internationally, and the exhibition on the Finnish passport — form an integral part of my research. Exhibitions serve as laboratories for exploring visual practices in public, inviting audiences to engage with the cultural, political, and technological dimensions of photography. Early historical projects, such as editorial work on C.G. Mannerheim’s Central Asian expedition, laid the groundwork for my ongoing interest in the historical layers of (visual) technologies.

This curatorial practice enriches my scholarly contributions by creating dialogical spaces between academic research, artistic production, and broader publics.