ARNO RAFAEL MINKKINEN: INSIDE THE MIND OF MY CAMERA

After college, Minkkinen went into advertising as a copywriter working on numerous accounts: Peugeot automobiles, J&B Scotch and Minolta cameras, for which he wrote the line: “What happens inside your mind can happen inside a camera.” Eventually, that slogan morphed into the branding line: “The Mind of Minolta.” Minkkinen started believing in his own copywriting, thinking that perhaps photography was a better way to unleash his creative impulses.

He signed up for a photography workshop at Apeiron in Millerton, New York, and visited the Museum of Modern Art to decide with which teacher he would most wish to study by viewing their works: totally unknown photographers to him at the time such as Robert Frank, Aaron Siskind, Bruce Davidson and Diane Arbus. Her portfolio, as Minkkinen recalls, “stopped me cold. I was especially taken by the picture of the odd little boy with the toy hand grenade, which I felt could have been a picture of me. I knew, then and there, Arbus was the photographer I wanted to study with. I was accepted into her workshop with my meager portfolio, but two weeks before the workshop was to begin, it was cancelled. I found out later, of course, that Diane Arbus had decided to leave this world.”

There was still room in John Benson’s workshop. After two days of shooting barns, cows and horses, Benson’s lukewarm reaction resulted in Minkkinen being advised to take a day off. Five-day workshop, skip Wednesday. “I think Benson knew I had signed up for Arbus.” In any case, Thursday morning Minkkinen carried an old mirror from behind a barn to a secluded hillside, set up his tripod and aimed his Minolta SRT-101 at the mirror.

“I guess I was thinking about what photograph I would have been making if I was in Arbus’ workshop,“ Minkkinen surmised. “So I took off my clothes and stepped in front of the mirror to see what I looked like naked. Since I didn’t understand exposure very well, I became a silhouette. I looked like I was standing in front of my grave.”

Everyone in the workshop loved that picture, and it planted the impetus for Minkkinen to take off in a completely new direction. “Millerton, New York, 1971” was his first deliberate self-portrait (there were some camera test shots the year before of his feet flying over a parking lot) in a long series that Minkkinen has been working on for 55 years, one of the longest-running, nonstop series of self-portraits in the history of photography.

Minkkinen actually doesn’t favor the term “self-portrait” in that he isn’t really trying to reveal or expose himself in these photographs. He much prefers seeing himself as “a being of nature,” reminding audiences that “we are all a part of the natural world as beings without clothes,” to borrow Minor White’s phrasing of nudity. And if an image of his body or parts thereof sometimes happens to strike the viewer as being surreal, quirky, unexpected or even humorous, so much the better.

Minkkinen’s sustainability secret is no secret. “Make it different, keep it the same. And so will it be in the coming years ahead.” Minkkinen is always on the lookout for photo opportunities as he travels around the world. He has made images in 33 American states, from Alaska to Florida, Arizona to Maine; and nearly every European country, from his homeland of Finland all the way to Malta; the Isle of Wight to Dubrovnik in Croatia. Russia, China, Japan, Mexico, Guatemala, Peru and Brazil add to the mix. He rarely goes out with a preconceived idea, but studies the landscape and tries to imagine how he might fit himself into the varied natural environments he discovers.

“I want people to step inside my shoes and step inside my body, so to speak. Not that it’s a great body, but I want to remind people that we all have bodies that we carry around underneath our clothes. And to feel free about that. In Finland, we are much more accepting of our bodies and nudity in general. I’m not an exhibitionist at all. To whatever extent I can, I wish to show how liberating it is to connect with nature in this natural way.”

Another reason Minkkinen focuses exclusively on himself relates to the issue of safety and being aloneness. For example, he climbs to the top of a mountain where the best photo opportunity happens to be, or extends half his torso over the Grand Canyon, or balances on one leg off an icy slope high above a rough, frigid sea. “There’s no way whatsoever to put anyone else in harm’s way for the sake of my photograph. I must do it myself. And if I fall, no one can be there to witness what could then, in the worst-case scenario, become my last picture.” All for the sake of art. It’s one of the key reasons Minkkinen photographs himself. “But, good to know,” he adds, “not all dangerous-looking pictures are dangerous, especially when making self-portraits with others.

“I once took a picture where I’m hanging off of an old, 60-meter-tall wooden ski jump in Finland. I had tied my wrist around a beam and hopped off the edge to see what I looked like with the howling snow below. You could never ask anybody else to do something crazy like that. Anything can happen. So I must take the risk myself, be alone, which also permits me to work at my own speed and on my own terms, I might add.”

Some pictures get stuck inside your head, and for whatever reason stay there forever. For me, it’s “Narragansett, Rhode Island, 1973.” On a personal note, I remember this picture distinctly from when I first saw it 50 years ago as a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, and encountering it recently led to my writing this article.

Minkkinen was a graduate student at Rhode Island School of Design at the time studying under Harry Callahan. Students were required to show new work every other week. Minkkinen went out on a cold April morning to Narragansett Beach, looking for ideas, but after four hours and not finding anything of interest, just gave up. He sat down on the boardwalk and stated that he was counting the waves when inspiration suddenly hit.

“I picked up the Minolta, advanced the film—still with no idea of what I was about to do. I took off my shirt and set the self-timer to nine seconds. At first, I thought I would just show the back of my head, but what actually happened had already been subliminally planted in my mind. I just didn’t know it yet. So I turned sideways and placed the camera on the boardwalk, aimed so that the lens was lined up with the space between the planks facing the sea. Then I activated the self-timer, and rather than turn sideways again to see the camera, I arched my head up and backwards 180 degrees, realizing immediately that my nose would center my open mouth in the crack between the planks, allowing the camera to see what my damn cleft palate looked like sitting on a boardwalk. When I processed the film, the single frame looked really strange. I brought the print of it to class, and Harry really liked it. Someone said it reminded them of Edvard Munch’s painting, ‘The Scream.’ I didn’t know the painter or the painting at the time, like Robert Frank and the rest. I majored in English, not Art History.

“I did learn later that this was the day Picasso passed away. I don’t know what that connection means, and I didn’t really know what the hell I was doing, either. I’m not a believer in coincidence, but I trust serendipity. I’m not clairvoyant, either. But I do have my hunches. Like when I climbed up to the top of that ski jump in Finland. I just had a hunch I could come back with something profound from that November snowfall, if indeed I did.

“Harry Callahan said that it comes down to ten pictures by the time you’re dead. Ten pictures define your legacy: what kind of photographer you were. I attended a lecture at a photographic education conference in the late ’70s by John Szarkowski, curator at the Museum of Modern Art, who claimed that so many great photographers actually did their best work within a ten-year span of time. Showing the slides, Szarkowski listed Ansel Adams and a large number of other famous photographers from the past, concentrating on their masterpieces. Only one photographer escaped the depressing damnation. Eugene Atget. Atget went a full thirty years making exquisite photographs of his beloved Paris.

“I want my pictures from yesterday to have the same quality and the same sense of wonder and discovery as the ones I made in 1971, 1982, 1993, 2004 and 2025. I would like my work to be timeless, cohesive and separate. In short, to behave the way Atget got his photographs to behave, from the beginning to the end.”

Addendum

Our thanks to Arno for his participation. Learn more about his philosophy and photography at arnorafaelminkkinen.com.