ARNO RAFAEL MINKKINEN Finland, b. 1945

Photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen was born in 1945 in Finland. He moved with his family to the United States in 1951.

Minkkinen takes black and white pictures in which his naked body or parts of his body blend into landscapes of lakes, mountains, forests and snow or integrate into surreal and often timeless environments. The photos are made without fakes or assistance and are not manipulated afterwards.

Arno Rafael Minkkinen exhibits for the first time in 1972 in Soho. The artist’s artworks are, among others, in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Addison Gallery of Axmerican Art in Andover, Massachusetts, the Centre Pompidou and the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, the Musée de l'Élysée in Lausanne, the Centre for Creative Photography in Arizona, the Finnish Museum of Photography and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.

"Nature guides and rules my photographic work like nothing else. Nature is the pilot, the mapmaker, the autocrat in charge of my tripod, lens, aperture, and shutter selection."