Julius Töyrylä
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Julius Töyrylä is a Finnish photographer based between Helsinki and Tunisia. He got his first camera from his godmother at fifteen and spent years documenting his hometown before studying fine art in Turku. He has been recording his dreams for over twenty years. In 2019, one dream came to him in Quechua, a language he had never encountered, and that was the start of his ongoing project Black Book, which pairs written dream accounts with photographs. He works with long exposure, double exposure and high ISO, building instability into the image on purpose.
Q: How did photography start for you? What made you pick up a camera?
A: My godmother gave me my first camera, and I started documenting my environment in my hometown, Orimattila, Finland. It was 2006, and I was 15 years old. At first, I didn’t feel that a camera could be a tool for subjective expression — that came later. In the beginning, I was just taking plain photos of things I saw.
I remember photographing a sleeping drunken man in the street. When I got the film developed, I felt ashamed of having taken the image. I burned it and didn’t tell anyone.
Self-expression and subjectivity came years later, around 2014, when I entered art school in Turku, Finland, and began to see the possibilities of the medium more clearly.
Q: You've been recording your dreams for over twenty years. When did you realise they could become work?
A: Dreams as a subject began around 2019. Soon after choosing that direction, my mental state took a turn for the worse. I’m not sure if they are related, but the timing felt like a strange coincidence. I was in bad shape for a long time.
I returned to old dream journals and started reconstructing dreams from memory. Over time, I began to see them as access points to deeper layers of the self — a place where the usual filters of identity fall away. Working with dreams involves fear. In them, you are fully honest, without the controlling voice of the waking self. That honesty can be unsettling, because it reveals things you might not want to confront.
In a world where so much is curated and shared, dreams remain deeply private. Turning them into art becomes, for me, a form of self-portraiture.
Q: The Black Book pairs written dream accounts with photographs. How close is the relationship between a text and its image?
A: In Black Book, the dream is the primary source. I see strong parallels between photography and dreaming — both operate through fragments, symbols, and emotional charge. Carl Jung’s idea of “big dreams” resonates with me: certain dreams carry a weight that stays with you, almost like a second memory alongside waking life. I think powerful photographs should function in a similar way. The catch is that it can be a photograph, whatever stings to you.
My aim is to translate intensity into images. The text sets a direction, but the photograph remains open — more like a map than an explanation. What interests me is the space between the two: where the viewer begins to construct their own meaning. The work offers suggestions, not answers, but still it makes a narrative of the unconscious.
Q: You use long exposure, double exposure, high ISO, techniques that introduce error on purpose. What are you looking for in that instability?
A: The short answer is that working digitally is what’s currently accessible to me. Ideally, I would produce everything by hand — using film, cyanotype, or mixed media — but for now I work with what I have. I’m interested in surrealism, especially how it emerges through rupture — not only in composition, but within the photographic process itself. There is a lot that can be done in-camera before post-production, and I try to push those limits.
It’s also important for me to state that I do not use AI in these works. The images are constructed and altered through the camera, then refined in post.
Q: Jung's idea of "big dreams" is important to you. Can you describe one that stayed?
A: The idea of “big dreams” felt true to me before I encountered depth psychology or Jungian thought. I could sense that certain dreams carried more weight — they stayed, even when I wanted to forget them. Around 2019, I had a dream that ultimately initiated this body of work. In it, I saw words and heard music that were unfamiliar to me. After waking, I wrote everything down and then left it aside.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was there. I later discovered that the words belonged to Quechua — a language previously unknown to me. The coincidence felt uncanny, especially since I am adopted from South America. That moment made me take dreams seriously as material — not just psychologically, but artistically and in a mystical sense.
