We are back with our series "The Viewing Room," where we take you inside our viewing room to see prints up close and personal! This week, Juli Lowe flips through gelatin silver prints by Arno Rafael Minkkinen, who photographs his body interacting and coexisting with nature.
Using a nine second delay on his camera, Minkkinen contorts his body into position, awaiting the familiar click of the shutter. A true purist, Minkkinen eschews double exposures or image manipulations through Photoshop. Instead, he tests the limits of his own physicality, assuming positions that seem improbable.
Arno Rafael Minkkinen was born in Helsinki in 1945, and moved to America when he was six. His work has been published, exhibited, and collected worldwide and is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Musée de l'Élysée (Lausanne), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris) and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, among many others.
Arno has recently created a brand new collaboration piece with artist Chehalis Deane Hegner titled A Collaboration, 2020 for our current exhibition "Photography & _____.” For this piece, Arno Rafael Minkkinen and Chehalis Deane Hegner sent each other three photographs representing the first third, the second third, and the last third of their respective careers. Then, they each wrote about the photographs without consulting or editing each other’s words.
View more of the Arno's work on our website here.