Exploring the relationship between the body and the environment, Arno Rafael Minkkinen’s photographs inhabit a space between self-portraiture and landscape photography. Minkkinen, who was born in Helsinki but immigrated to the United States after World War II, studied with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind in the early 1970s. His black-and-white self-portraits feature stark nature scenes interpolated with isolated elements of his nude body. Addressing the surreal and timeless quality of these images, Minkkinen has said, “there is no age to the picture when it is just the landscape and the body.”
Published and exhibited worldwide, Minkkinen’s work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Centre Pompidou and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne; the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; The Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki; and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.