Arno Rafael Minkkinen


Arno Rafael Minkkinen is a Finnish-American photographer who works in the United States.
Published and exhibited worldwide, Minkkinen’s work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Finnish Museum of Photography.
Seven solo monographs on his work have been published: Frostbite, Waterline, Body Land, SAGA: The Journey of Arno Rafael Minkkinen, 35 Years of Photographs, Homework: The Finnish Photographs, Swimming in the Air, and Balanced Equation. The retrospective survey SAGA premiered at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA, in 2005. The 120-print retrospective toured to Romania, Slovakia, Finland, Italy, China, and Canada.
Minkkinen was made a Knight of the Order of the Lion of Finland of the first class by the Finnish government in 1992, and awarded the Finnish State Art Prize in Photography in 2006.

Early life and education

Minkkinen was born in Helsinki, Finland in 1945 and emigrated to the United States in 1951. He graduated from Wagner College with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature, and began taking self-portraits in 1971, while working as an advertising copywriter on Madison Avenue in New York. He later studied with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at Rhode Island School of Design and earned his Master of Fine Arts degree in photography in 1974.

Career

Over the past four decades, Minkkinen has been engaged as a teacher, curator, and writer while continuing to devote his photographic research and energies to the self-portrait.

Teaching activities

Minkkinen is a Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and also serves as lecturer at Aalto University of Art & Design Helsinki. Earlier in his teaching career he served as Assistant Professor at M.I.T., Visiting Artist at Philadelphia College of Art, the École d’Arts Appliqués in Vevey, Switzerland, and as graduate faculty at Maine Media College in Rockport, Maine.
Since joining UMass Lowell in 1987, Minkkinen has taken students to Finland and Russia, and Czechoslovakia. In 1996, in a collaborative UMass Lowell/Lahti Institute of Design exchange program called Spirit Level, thirty Finnish, American, and Swiss students toured through Finland, Russia, and Eastern Europe for three weeks with Minkkinen and photo department head at Lahti, Timo Laaksonen. The program later included Tuscany in Italy, Oaxaca, Mexico, collaborations with Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland and the Foundation Studio Marangoni in Florence, Italy as well as the Bilder Nordic School of Photography in Oslo and the École Supérieure d’Arts & Medias de Caen/Cherbourg in France for an American Road Trip to the studio farmlands of American photographer Sally Mann. The first three workshops resulted in the publication of a book commemorating those first three experiences.
Minkkinen has taught workshops worldwide, particularly at the Maine Photographic Workshops, Maine Media College, the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University, Anderson Ranch in Colorado, Santa Fe Workshops in New Mexico, the Friends of Photography in Carmel, California, and in Europe at the Rencontres d’Arles in Arles, France, the Toscana Photographic Workshops in Tuscany, Italy, as well as workshop programs in Finland, Norway, Luxembourg, and China. Minkkinen served a second four-year term as national board member of the Society of Photographic Education.

Recent work

Since 2009, Minkkinen has developed a growing interest in feature filmmaking and screenwriting. In 2010, he received a first round of support from the Finnish Film Foundation for a screenplay he had written and will be directing. It will be shot in Finnish Karelia and Finntown, Brooklyn. The demo preview of The Rain House was screened at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center in connection with the Dance Films Association’s 41st Dance on Camera Festival.

Publications

Monographs and curated anthologies

Collections

Minkkinen's work is held in the following permanent collections: