Tallinn – Fotografiska Tallinn (Peegel Pildis)

The third exhibition at Fotografiska was about sport, marking that this year Tallinn is the European Capital of Sport. It’s based around the work of Lembit Peegel and Pildis is Estonian for “in the picture”.

This reminds me of my friend Dave Morgan on one of his walking exploits, not least one of the Spine Races that he’s just completed. He’s that bit braver than I am, although I know that I set the bar really high.

Perhaps inevitably, I’m not really going to have a close interest in Estonian sports from the 1970s to the 1990s, but the imagery is human and shows the personality of the sportspeople. There was a freedom for Estonian photographers specialising in areas such as sport and culture, as they didn’t have to get too caught up in journalistic limitations that the Soviet influenced regime might have placed on them. There is quite a lot of raw emotion visible in a number of the photos and the exhibition explains the important role that he had in the newly independent Estonia in the 1990s and forging that new national identity. I was more intrigued by this exhibition than I expected to be, it’s an interesting way of seeing the evolution of sport in Estonia and it gave the collection a real purpose. And good luck to Tallinn in their year as the Capital of European Sport, I hope that they concentrate on the toughest and most challenging of all sporting endeavours, namely long distance walking.