Shot between 2020 and 2024, Cruise (published by Garret Publications) is a photo book capturing the Finnish subculture of pilluralli, where young people gather with their cars on weekend nights, driving loops around their towns or simply hanging out. Using a subtle but rich and vivid colour palette, the series is a compelling mixture of portraits (his subjects typically stare directly at the camera, with expressions ranging from shy to defiant); suburban landscapes, and shots of the cars themselves, including striking close-ups of details, such as a fuchsia door-handle and a car door loaded with speakers. It’s a depiction of provincial Finland at once desolate and humming with life. 

According to photographer Jussi Puikkonen, pilluralli is a social ritual which allows its participants to construct meaning, identity and belonging. “It’s a right of passage,” he tells Dazed. “It’s when they become adults, when they get their first car, and when they have their own private space for the first time.”  Born and raised in Finland, where he studied photography, Puikkonen has been living in Amsterdam for the last 15 years. He was aware of the culture depicted in Cruise, having grown up in a small town, but he missed out on participating in pilluralli himself; he moved to Helsinki at a young age, and it exists “basically everywhere” except the capital city. It took moving away from Finland to see the beauty in it: most people living there don’t. It’s widely thought of as noisy and antisocial.

As well as being widely viewed as a public nuisance, pilluralli is often discussed as a symbol of social exclusion. “In many small towns, the young kids don't have anything to do, so they just sit in their cars, and they end up doing nothing – that’s how it’s viewed,” he says. As a coming-of-age ritual, it’s more or less a cross-class phenomenon. “It’s not literally everyone who does it, but in smaller towns it’s often the main way young people spend their time,” he explains. But once people start moving away to attend university or find jobs in bigger cities, there is a visible socio-economic divide in terms of who is left behind,  still sitting in their cars on the edge of town.

When he returned to his home country during the Covid lockdown, Puikkonen looked at the phenomenon with fresh eyes. “This is their passion, and I find it interesting when people are passionate about something,” he says. It represents a very Finnish form of socialising. “Generally, we are quite reserved, so it fits that mentality quite well. Because you're sitting in your car, you have that protection, and you can observe from there, and slowly, you can get to know other people who are doing it.” There’s a creative element too, with many of these young people having spent a great deal of time and effort painstakingly modifying their cars: one shot, for example, shows an inner door fitted decked out with five speakers. “It’s funny, because the cars might be worth €500, and the sound system they put in might cost €10,000.” 

Finnish people may have a tendency to be reserved, but he received a warm welcome from everyone he approached, and the vast majority were happy to have their photographs taken. ”I didn’t have any hidden agenda. I told them that I’m just interested in what they’re doing and that I wasn’t sure whether it was going to be a book, an exhibition, or whatever. About 95 per cent said that was totally fine, and invited me into their cars.”

Puikkonen’s guiding principle as an artist is that he wants his work to be real. “I try not to set things up too much,” he says. He draws inspiration from American photographers like Alec Soth and Joel Sternfield, along with filmmakers who communicate more through images than words: Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, a slow-burning, languorous account of a holiday between a father and his young daughter, was a “huge influence”.

What may not be apparent about these images at first glance is that most of them were made at night-time; as they were shot in the northern regions of Finland in the height of summer, they’re still flooded with a moody, crepuscular light. “I wanted to emphasise the nightless night,” says Puikkonen. Eventually, he expanded to shooting in winter too, which led to one of the stand-out shots of the series: taken on a foggy evening, the fluorescent lights from a nearby harbour paint the sky a deep, burning orange. Like the best photography often does, Cruise finds the magic in a subject matter too easily dismissed as banal.

Cruise by Jussi Puikkonen is published by Garret Publications and is available from your bookshop.