Animal farm … Pentti Sammallahti's Solovki, White Sea 2, Russia (1992). Click for full image. Photograph: Pentti Sammallahti/Dewi Lewis Publishing  You could say Pentti Sammallahti was born for photography. His grandmother, Hildur Larsson, was an accomplished Swedish photographer for the Helsinki newspaper Kaiku in the 1900s. He grew up surrounded by her images. His father took him, aged nine, to the famous Family of Man group exhibition, curated by Edward Steichen, when it came to Helsinki in 1959. From that moment, the young Sammallahti knew what he wanted to do with his life.  At 11, he made his first photographs – small contact prints of everyday life in Helsinki. In 1964, he joined the Helsinki Camera Club and blossomed. He had his first solo show in 1971, aged 20. The earliest photograph in Here, Far Away, a beautiful retrospective book of his work just published in Britain, dates from 1964, when he was 14. A man sleeps in a doorway, oblivious to the bird that pecks at the earth in the foreground. It is an almost austere image, formally accomplished and understated in its arrangement of vertical and horizontal lines: the doorframe, the wood panels, the bricked pavement. But there is an odd melancholic poetry too, not least in the two stark white lines someone has painted on the doorframe, one of which seems to rise, dreamlike, out of the sleeping man's outstretched palm. Above the bird, on the wall, someone has chalked a neat love heart with an arrow though it. Even at 14, Sammallahti's eye was drawn to the quiet illumination of everyday life. As he grew older, his vision deepened and widened, becoming both more poetic and more austere.  The book is divided into nine chapters, each a record of Sammallahti's restless wanderings through Finland, Norway, Britain, eastern Europe, Africa, China and India. His first published portfolio, a limited edition of 200 signed silver gelatin prints in a box, featured images taken in the west of Ireland in 1978. It was dedicated to Paul Strand, but his photographs of rural Ireland, as well as those taken in Hungary and Romania, have more in common with Josef Koudelka's images of similar people and places. Sammallahti's gaze, though, is warmer, more intimate and, at times, more epic. A landscape in Erdőbénye, Hungary, taken in 1979, looks like a monochrome still from a beautiful film, or a landscape painting drained of colour. There is something both old-fashioned and timeless about it. A horse-drawn carriage transports two farmers and several stacks of hay. The wet road sweeps off into a misty backdrop, where two faraway steeples are divided by a telegraph pole rising out of tall grasses, silver-grey in the muted light. Sammallahti prints his own photographs, and the deep tones and textures are evidence of an equally deep patience and craftsmanship.  It was in the frozen expanses of Solovki on the White Sea in Russia that Sammallahti made some of his most extraordinary images. Here, the blankness of the landscape, shading into grey forests or skies, is an atmosphere in itself. Wolfish dogs and solitary birds feature in many of the images, survivors in a harsh, beautiful environment where everything – rivers, lakes, skies and bare trees – seems frozen into stillness. He also captures the changing of the seasons – snow giving way to mud, a different kind of grey making the landscape an entirely different world.  For all that, Sammallahti's vision is also a lyrical one. He often captures humans and animals in worlds of their own, lost in reverie: dogs chase birds, birds cautiously approach humans or circle above them. Often, his camera captures a single figure in a dreamlike landscape: a man walking down a road in a silent, snow-covered world at dusk, his dog waiting, patient but alert, ahead of him. You can almost hear the crunch of snow underfoot. But what is most palpable is the silence of the surroundings. Looking at the photograph, you feel on the threshold of another, more mysterious world that is indeed here and far away.  The Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto is most famous for the series Seascapes, for which he used a large format camera to take long exposures of the sea and sky in various locations around the globe. Until 17 November, eight of the resulting black and white images are being shown alongside eight of Mark Rothko's late black and grey paintings at the Pace London.  At Ffotogallery there's a new installation by Jo Longhurst exploring ideas of perfection through "the physical and emotional experiences of elite athletes".  From 26 October until 13 January 2013, Foam in Amsterdam hosts a major Diane Arbus retrospective featuring 200 works that "explore the origins, scope, and aspirations of a wholly original force in photography".
Sean O'Hagan: The restless Finnish photographer is a craftsman who finds the same odd, melancholic poetry in locations across the globe