BIOGRAPHY:
BACKGROUND, PROFESSIONS, & PRACTICE
Arno Rafael Minkkinen is a Finnish American photographer with over 100 solo exhibitions—with some three dozen of these being museum venues—and 200 group exhibitions at galleries, museums, and institutions worldwide. Emeritus Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Docent at Aalto University School of Art, Design, and Architecture in Helsinki, Minkkinen’s writings and academic and curatorial endeavors have been equally extensive and international in scope. Already in 1969—well before the self-portrait genre became what it is today—Minkkinen began what would become a personal quest, dedicating over five decades now to a single concept, that of unmanipulated nude self-portraits in communion and counterpoint with nature and urban settings. To date his shooting locations number 30 countries around the world and 30 American States.
After obtaining a B.A. degree in English Literature from Wagner College, Minkkinen spent five years as Madison Avenue copywriter working primarily on automobile, airline, and camera accounts. A headline he wrote for Minolta cameras—What happens inside your mind can happen inside a camera— inspired him to study with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at Rhode Island School of Design where he received his MFA degree in photography in 1974.
TEACHING
Minkkinen’s teaching career spans decades and continents with initial appointments as lecturer at Taideteolinen Korkeakoulu (Aalto University today) and the Lahti Design Institute in Finland (1974–76 and 1984–86); assistant professor at Minor White’s Creative Photography Laboratory at MIT (1977–1981); visiting artist at the Philadelphia College of Art, 1981–82 (University of the Arts today); full professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell (1987–2015); visiting professor at the École d’Arts Appliqués in Vevey, Switzerland (1995–2005, during academic breaks at UMass Lowell) and the Bilder Nordic School of Photography in Oslo, Norway. Worldwide workshops have been held in numerous countries: Brazil, China, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and Russia, among them. At some of the photography world’s most renowned workshop institutions, such as the Toscana Photographic Workshops in Italy, the Santa Fe Workshops in New Mexico, Anderson Ranch Workshops in Colorado, Maine Media Workshops, and Arles in France, Minkkinen has taught on numerous occasions over many a summer over the decades.
PUBLICATIONS, COLLECTIONS, & GALLERIES
Eight monographs have been published: Frostbite (Morgan & Morgan, 1978), Waterline (Aperture, Marval, and Otava, 1994), Body Land (Motta, Nathan, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997-99), SAGA: The Journey of Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Thirty- Five Years of Photographs (Chronicle Books, 2005), Homework: The Finnish Photographs, 1973 to 2008 (Like Publishing, Ltd, 2008), Swimming in the Air (Cavallo Point, 2008), Balanced Equation (Lodima Press, 2010), Taivaanranta–Firmamento (Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, 2018), and Minkkinen (Kehrer Verlag, 2019).
Minkkinen’s photographs are held in over 75 prominent museum and institutional collections worldwide, including the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, the Musée de l’Élysée in Lausanne, the National Gallery Ateneum in Helsinki, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Japan, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the High Museum in Atlanta, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, the National Art Gallery in Ottawa, and the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts.
Nine galleries worldwide represent Minkkinen’s work: Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York and Zurich; Robert Klein Gallery in Boston; Willas Contemporary in Oslo and Stockholm; Galerie Camera Obscura in Paris; Galerie Valerie Bach in Brussels; Photo & Contemporary in Torino; Persons Projects in Berlin; In Focus Galerie in Cologne; and SEE+ Gallery in Beijing.
HONORS, FELLOWSHIPS, GRANTS, & AWARDS
1991 National Endowment for the Arts Regional Grant
1993 Finland's Order of the Lion First Class Medal of Knighthood 1994 Grand Prix du Livre for Waterline at the 25th Recontres d’Arles 1996 Scritture d’Acqua, Salsomaggiore Terme, Italy
2005 Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant
2006 Finnish State Art Prize in Photography
2006 Lianzhou International Photo Festival, Guangdong Province, China Special Jury Prize for SAGA: The Journey of Arno Rafael Minkkinen
2010 Finnish Film Foundation Screenwriting Grant
2012 Nancy Donahue Endowed Professorship in the Arts, University of Massachusetts Lowell
2013 Lucie Award for Achievement in Fine Art
2015 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship
2015 Society for Photographic Education Regional Honored Educator
2017 Pro Finlandia Medal, Finland’s Highest Honor in the Arts
2019 Society for Photographic Education National Honored Educator
2019 German Photo Book Prize (Gold) for Minkkinen
2020 Finnish Photo Book Award Honorary Jury Selection (Minkkinen)