Arno Rafael Minkkinen Biography
Arno Rafael Minkkinen is a Finnish-American photographer. He was born in Helsinki in 1945 and emigrated to the United States in 1951. A graduate of Wagner College with a BA in English Literature, he began taking self-portraits in 1971 while working as an advertising copywriter on the Minolta camera account. Studying with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at Rhode Island School of Design, he earned his MFA in photography in 1974. Over the next thirty-five years he has been primarily engaged as a teacher, curator, and writer while continuing to devote his photographic research and energies to
the self-portrait, unmanipulated images of the human figure in the natural landscape.
Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Minkkinen also serves as Docent at the University of Art & Design Helsinki and visiting professor at the Lahti Design Institute in Finland. Earlier in his teaching career he served as Assistant Professor at MIT and Visiting Artist at Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts).
Published and exhibited worldwide, Minkkinen’s work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in
New York, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, the Centre Pompidou and Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Musée de l’Élysée in Lausanne, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography among many others.
Six monographs have been published: Frostbite (1978), Waterline (1994, winner of the 25th Rencontres d'Arles Book Prize), Body Land (1999), SAGA: The Journey of Arno Rafael Minkkinen, 35 Years of Photographs (2005), and Homework:
The Finnish Photographs, 1973 to 2008 and Swimming in the Air (both 2008). SAGA premiered at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln in 2005. The 120-print retrospective toured to Romania, Slovakia, Finland, Italy, China as well as Canada and returns to America in 2009.
Six galleries represent Minkkinen's work: Robert Klein Gallery in Boston, Barry Friedman Ltd. and Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York, Fay Gold Gallery in Atlanta, Galerie Agathe Gaillard in Paris, Galerie Anhava in Helsinki, and SEE + Gallery in Beijing.
Recently elected to the National Board of the Society of Photographic Education, Minkkinen was conferred knighthood with the First Class Order of the Lion Medal by the Finnish government in 1992 and awarded the Finnish State Art Prize in Photography in 2006. He lives with his wife Sandra on Fosters Pond in Andover, Massachusetts.
THE FILM
Like waterlogged photo albums that never dry, The Rain House — a mother and son, beauty and the beast, love story – rips apart page by page. 80% fiction, 80% fact, the feature length narrative unlocks the splendor and rawness of love and war, of birth and death, through secret epiphanies in seesaw with the truth. Aino Palmikko, princess child of a Finnish landowner friendly to Czarist Russia, finds her calling as a night ward nurse in the Winter War, a gun-shy cavalry patient eyeing her every move. Caught in the shattered aftermath of a bombed-out Helsinki, the couple emigrates, three boys in tow, for the roller coaster life of a “Finglish American Dream”. It is in Brooklyn that Aino, ever the beauty queen, and Aku, her deformed cleft palate son, face off as they come to grips with a cruel, unjust world. Denied license to practice in America, Aino vows to regain her dignity while Aku’s scars, in spite of the traumatic, and often erotic, schoolboy escapades he endures, remain a punch in the mouth that never heals, at least while she is alive. With poetic and cinematic beauty, The Rain House arrives at truths told too late: “We cannot change the way we look, but we can change the way we are seen.”
THE CO- DIRECTOR
Kimmo Koskela is an award-winning Finnish director, cinematographer and producer working in experimental
short films, dance films, documentaries and various art projects since the early eighties. Widely broadcasted on major Finnish TV-stations, Koskela’s films have won many prestigious national and international prizes.
THE WRITER , CO-DIRECTOR
Arno Rafael Minkkinen is a Finnish-American photographer, writer, curator, and educator. For decades now, he has explored his roots in search of the invisible line that separates man from the primordial.
His often surreal and timeless black & white self-portrait works - made most recently in China, Mexico, Norway and his beloved Finnish homeland - are never manipulated; rather they are direct documents of what happened in front of the lens.
THE COLLABORATION
Koskela and Minkkinen have worked as a team since 1984 when Koskela began documenting the life and work of Arno Rafael Minkkinen that resulted in the 1996, 52-min documentary film STILL NOT THERE. The film can be viewed as a full-scale documentary work that operates on a
fictional level as well. Through a unique visual context, wherein Minkkinen conceives and performs while Koskela films and edits, the audience gains insight into the very works to which the film pays homage.
STILL NOT THERE has won three prestigious awards:
• Emmy Award nominee. Finland, 1996.
• Prize of Honour. Art Film Triennal in Kalmar, Sweden, 1997.
• The Silver Key. Sixth international Art Film Festival in Bratislava, Slovak Republic, 1998.
SCREAM OF THE MADONNA continues to advance the winning collaboration of Koskela and Minkkinen, a unique creative team that combines the talents of a filmmaker/director with those of a writer/photographer.
Arno Rafael Minkkinen 2009
