A small fishing harbour in winter, trawlers moored against a snow-covered quay under a low sky

Jonas Aalto

Documentary photographer, Helsinki

Salt Ledger

Vardø · Båtsfjord · Kiberg, 2019–2025

Selected
work

Twelve photographs from four long-term projects, made on the northern coasts between 2013 and 2025.

An older man mending a fishing net on a shed floor, his hands blurred with movement — Net mender, morning shiftBåtsfjord, Norway, 2021

Waves frozen into ridges of ice along a stone breakwater at dusk — Ice on the breakwaterVardø, Norway, 2020

A woman in a heavy work jacket standing alone in an empty fish auction hall — Hilde, after the auctionVardø, Norway, 2022

Rows of wooden racks hung with drying cod beneath steep mountains — Drying racks, cod seasonHenningsvær, Lofoten, 2017

A harbour before dawn, a single floodlight reflected in still black water — Harbour at four in the morningKlaksvík, Faroe Islands, 2015

Workers in aprons at a steel gutting table, steam rising under strip lights — Gutting shed, night crewBåtsfjord, Norway, 2023

Two elderly brothers on the deck of a small wooden boat, looking away from each other — Brothers, the last boatKiberg, Norway, 2019

A boat slipway disappearing into fog on a flat island shore — Fog over the slipwayHailuoto, Finland, 2014

A kitchen table by a window with a coffee pot, a radio and an oilskin coat on the chair — The skipper’s kitchenHvalba, Faroe Islands, 2016

Snow settling on coiled ropes and winches on the deck of a trawler — Snow on the trawler deckHamningberg, Norway, 2024

Two teenage girls sitting at the end of a wooden pier with their backs to the camera — Girls on the herring pierKokkola, Finland, 2018

Red-roofed fishing cabins on stilts in the last low light of a winter afternoon, rendered in grey — Last light over the rorbuerReine, Lofoten, 2017

Open sea under a heavy winter sky, a single boat far out on the horizon

“When the fish leave, a town doesn’t die all at once. It forgets itself slowly, one house at a time, and you only notice when the lights are gone.”
Hilde Johansen, fish buyer, Vardø

Project

Salt
Ledger

Salt Ledger follows three towns on the Varanger peninsula through six winters, as the fish plants that built them close, change owners or reopen with fewer hands. The title comes from the account books I found in Kiberg’s abandoned salting house, still listing every barrel shipped south in 1961.

From January to March each year I rented rooms above the harbours and photographed the people who stayed: the night crew at the Båtsfjord plant, the last two brothers fishing out of Kiberg, the women who run the auction in Vardø.

Format: Medium-format film, 2019–2025
Book: Kehrer Verlag, 2025, 168 pages
Supported by: Finnish Cultural Foundation, Fritt Ord

The night crew of a fish plant gathered by a loading door, breath visible in the cold — The night crewBåtsfjord, 2020

An open handwritten account book on a dusty table in an abandoned salting house — The ledgerKiberg, 2019

Two brothers casting off a small boat from an icy quay in blue morning darkness — Arne and Odd, casting offKiberg, 2021

In 1961 Kiberg shipped eleven thousand barrels of salted cod. Last winter the harbour landed fish on fourteen days. I wanted to photograph that arithmetic without ever showing a number.

Buyers in caps leaning over crates of fish at an early morning auction — Auction, six a.m.Vardø, 2022

A woman seated at her kitchen table, the harbour visible through the window behind her — Hilde’s kitchenVardø, 2023

Mooring lines thick with ice stretched between a quay and a trawler hull — Ice on the mooring linesBåtsfjord, 2024

An empty wooden pier running out into flat water at the end of the season — End of the seasonKiberg, 2025

Contact sheet frame: gloved hands holding a cod by the gills

Contact sheet frame: a shuttered fish plant office with a calendar left on the wall

Contact sheet frame: a boy on a bicycle on a snow-packed harbour road

Contact sheet frame: gulls circling above a fishing boat entering the harbour

Contact sheet frame: stacked salt barrels in a dark warehouse

Contact sheet frame: a woman's face lit by a single window in a fish auction hall

Portrait of Jonas Aalto in a wool coat on a harbour quay, a medium-format camera at his chest — Jonas Aalto on the quay in Vardø, 2022. Photograph by Hilde Johansen.

I go back to the same harbours until people stop noticing the camera and start telling me what the sea has taken.

I grew up in Kokkola on the Gulf of Bothnia, where my grandfather salted herring for export until the plant closed in 1987. After studying photography in Helsinki I spent ten years on newspaper assignments, always leaving a place just as I was beginning to understand it.

Now I work slowly, on medium-format film and in a handful of towns, returning each winter for weeks at a time. Most of the people in these pictures I have known for years; some have asked me to come along on their last trip out.