Interview of Arno Rafael Minkkinen

In light of Minkkinen's commemorative exhibition Arno Rafael Minkkinen: Fifty Years currently on view at Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York, Consul General Mika Koskinen spoke to the artist about his early days in Finland, emigration to the United States and shooting in different regions of the world over the last decades.

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© Arno Rafael Minkkinen: From the Shelton Hotel Looking East, 2005 (Edwynn Houk Gallery)

Arno Rafael Minkkinen is a Finnish-American photographer, whose illustrious career has spanned over fifty years. Minkkinen's signature black and white photographs, which are known for portraying human bodies in astounding and often meditative poses against serene natural backgrounds, can be found in the permanent collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.

In light of Minkkinen's commemorative exhibition Arno Rafael Minkkinen: Fifty Years currently on view at Edwynn Houk Gallery(Link to another website.) in New York, Consul General Mika Koskinen spoke to the artist about his early days in Finland, emigration to the United States and shooting in different regions of the world over the last decades.


Mika Koskinen: Your Finnish family made a decision in the 1950’s to start a new life in the United States. Please, tell us a little bit more of the background for this important decision?

Arno Rafael Minkkinen: My father was born in Kiso-Fukushima, Japan, the son of Finnish missionaries. My mother was born on an island off Koivisto, a family paradise lost to Russia after the Winter War. He was in the cavalry recuperating in a military hospital in Viipuri. She was his nurse. They fell in love like something out of Doctor Zhivago. During the Continuation War, the windows of their third-floor apartment would rattle on Helsinki’s Mechelininkatu, rushing them off to the nearest bomb shelter, two toddlers in tow. I was born in the year Hitler imploded but before the big mushroom clouds billowed over Japan. I spent the first nine months of my life in hospitals with two back-to-back cleft palate operations; when I learned to walk it was witnessed, not by my parents, but by the nurses.

My father was a budding journalist. Religion and philosophy were his bread and butter; a share in a cosmetics shop on Bulevardi their financial resource. My mother now had three boys to bring up, often solo. In 1949 my father spent many months away in New York in search of their American Dream in Brooklyn. Colleagues at the Finnish American Society for which he worked had warned him about Russia, still voracious for the whole of Finland one day (as it did with Hungary in 1956 while Finland found a way to come to an understanding). In any case, my parents had had enough of bombs bursting in the Helsinki air. But it wasn’t an easy decision for her to make, saying goodbye to family and friends.

Still, America held Lady Liberty’s torch. Together they decided to swap the make-up shop for boat tickets to Ellis Island. We arrived on a hot summer day, the Fourth of July with firecrackers exploding in the air. We got into the country on a Japanese quota and settled for the first few weeks in Finntown off Sunset Park in Brooklyn, a neighborhood to which we would move back again after a five-year stint in Bensonhurst, overlooking the Coney Island Parachute Jump on the horizon of Gravesend Bay. Had my parents decided to stay in Finland, my life as I know it nearly 70 years later would have been the life of some Joku Toinen, someone else. Still, I thank my parents for the one vast possession they made sure we never abandoned when we immigrated to America: the Finnish language.

“What happens inside your mind can happen inside a camera.” It didn’t take long for that headline to hit home with me too: “… can happen inside my camera!”

MK: When did you realize that photography could be your career?

ARM: My father’s dream was to follow his father’s career in Japan, which the war made impossible to fulfill. So he transferred the dream to me, but his influence to guide me in this direction faded the moment I left home for college. Once I learned to read, only in the sixth grade, words gave my imagination the anchoring point I needed to fix my sights on my own dream. Jesus couldn’t compete with James Joyce. I wanted to write the great Finnish American novel and became an English Literature major. I didn’t realize how devastating this news would be for him. I had called him with the news from a phone booth in college with what turned out to be a last dime. He was an archivist at the Finnish Consulate by then. Four months later he succumbed to a heart attack. As I write in my piece, Voyage of the Self, in the new monograph from Kehrer Verlag, I got to hate dimes.

Words. Words are what opened my pathway to photography. I was hired in January 1970 (fifty years ago now) as a Madison Avenue copywriter on the Minolta account. As life would have it, I aced the interview at the advertising agency on the fact that I had made several self-portraits the year before with Jussi Rahkonen’s used Linhof 4 x 5 camera, a Finntown friend from whom my father had purchased it to take portraits at the Consulate. Linhof. The creative director’s eyes lit up when he heard it. A month later I was introduced as the agency expert at Minolta headquarters. All self-taught, the same learning to write headlines: “Jingle Bells” for J&B Scotch, “Between the Bugs and Benz, there’s a Balanced Machine” for Peugeot, and then the line for Minolta that changed my life entirely: “What happens inside your mind can happen inside a camera.” It didn’t take long for that headline to hit home with me too: “… can happen inside my camera!

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© Arno Rafael Minkkinen: Fosters Pond, 2020

MK: What have been the highlights of your career?

ARM: A tough question can sometimes be answered simply. The highlights have been so many they blend into one another like a strawberry cake. Every slice of the cake is going to be equally delicious. But to single out some of the strawberries, one for each decade, here are five highlights:

1970s Ninety days traveling with my wife Sandra, her dear sister Cher, and my cool brother-in-law, Donn, in a 1969 Saab V4 Sedan through much of Europe and Eastern Europe, the car packed to every last cavity we could find with everything from tripod to tent poles to a maximum number each one’s socks, T-shirts, underwear and such that we’d wash out in camping sites from the Alps to Barcelona beaches, even the clothes pins and line to dry them found some cubby hole under the emergency brake or in the hub caps. Well, not there. Too noisy.   From Finland by ferry to Denmark and ferry again, pedal to the metal through Germany, 120 kilometers tops, to Paris and Bordeaux, to Madrid, Toledo, Valencia, literally pushing the clutchless V4 by then back over the border to a repair shop in France, and on to Switzerland, to Austria, to Hungary, to Poland, and back by boat again to Finland. 90 Days. Among some of the images I made, besides tons of slides, are a number of key early 1970s images, like the one submerged underwater like a ghost holding on to a side rail against the ferocious current. The travel bug remained with me ever since. Many photographers working with self-portraits tend to make them in single locations, like a house or studio, and mostly indoors at that. Our 1975 trip crisscrossing Europe inspired the multiple backgrounds that thereafter have populated, other than Fosters Pond where we live in Massachusetts, nearly all of my working locations since.

1980s Our second two-year stint in Finland (the first happened ten years earlier) teaching once again at the Lahti Institute of Design and Helsinki’s School of Industrial Arts (today Aalto University School of Art, Design, and Architecture). It was a time when some of the students from both schools began making their mark pushing art photography’s boundaries toward color, expressive documentary, installation art, and contemporary strains of today’s practitioners. But there was another student in Finland dearest to our hearts, our son Daniel. Arriving as a five-year-old not yet riding a bike or having experienced a low hill ski jump, he came back to America, sport skills under his belt and ready for soccer, speaking Finnish like a kunnon suomalainen poika (a real Finnish boy).

1990s Finnice, the 1991 exhibition extravaganza on the French Riviera stands as perhaps the single most expansive export of Finnish photography to date. Showcasing a broad selection of photographers from Finland’s earliest practitioners such as I. K. Inha and Marja Vuorelainen to contemporary voices even to this day such as Raakel Kuukka, Pekka Turunen, Stefan Bremer, and Veli Granö, Finnice’s 28 artists established Finland’s role in the international circuit into one of the leading contemporary photography countries today. Organized by Nice-Audiovisuel and curated by Jean-Pierre Giusto, my role was that of deputy commissioner, enlisted to introduce Mr. Giusto and his team to as broad a selection of Finnish photographers as possible, filling the 28-venue Septembre de la Photo festival’s array of galleries, institutions, and museums from Nice to Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Cannes to Mougins, and Villefranche-sur-Mer with the best Finland had to offer. Camera International magazine, for its part, followed up with a full issue devoted to Finnice.

2000s  SAGA: The Journey of Arno Rafael  Minkkinen: Thirty-Five Years in Photography (Chronicle Books, 2005) with essays by Alan Lightman, A. D. Coleman, and Arthur Danto was the second major retrospective monograph of my career. The exhibition venues included museums in Lincoln, Massachusetts; Bucharest, Romania; Bratislava, Slovenia; Reggio Emilia, Italy; Salo, Finland; Beijing, China; and Winnipeg, Canada. While an earlier monograph (Waterline, Otava, Marval, Aperture, 1994 with an essay by Michel Tournier) travelled within Europe, SAGA began to expand the reach of my work around the globe.

2010s Radu Stern, former director of Vevey’s École d’arts appliqués in Switzerland, knew how to boost confidence. “Harvest time will come,” he said. This last decade with the Lucie Award for Achievement in Fine Arts, photography’s Oscar (2013), followed by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2015), followed by the Order of the Lion Pro Finlandia Medal (2017), followed by the German Photo Book Prize (2019) makes one start to think harvest time works like all those biennales do, every other year. Trophy time, to call it that, can now come to an end. Each and every amazing award has always been such a humbling treasure. These things belong to so many. “Up with the new!” Aaron Siskind always said.

MK: This year you celebrate the 50th anniversary of your career. For this occasion you inaugurated on January 4 a wonderful exhibition at the Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York. Could you tell us more about this exhibition?

ARM: Also teaching at RISD was Harry Callahan, of course, my principal mentor and beloved teacher. When it comes to demonstrating a life’s work in photography, he said, it actually boils down to a small group of images, works that tell the same story from many different perspectives. In this beautifully installed exhibition of fifteen works from five decades, curator Veronica Houk has unlocked the very code that operates across nearly all of my work. Look through a display copy of the new 330-page monograph at the gallery (with essays by Keith F. Davis, Vicki Goldberg, and chapter texts by me) to see what I mean. She illustrates with her selection the goals I have set throughout these 200 seasons (you live longer counting by seasons). My hope is and has always been to make pictures that come close to being images that I have never seen before. To do that, conundrum that it is, the pictures need to be the same as much as they need to be different. They need to speak with the same voice, the voice of my eye and no other’s. Just what’s there in the viewfinder, a frame no one else sees, not even me, given that I am in front of the lens.

MK: After your childhood years you have been living in Finland periodically. You are very loyal to your roots as Finland is an ongoing and pervasive aspect of your photography and beautifully represented in your work. Being an ambassador of photography of Finland, how do you see your role in promoting our country?

ARM: Research, service, and teaching are the fundamental parameters for obtaining tenure in universities. I have tried to apply these tenets of excellence to my work as a representative of Finland around the world. Below are four maps showing the range of my endeavors with my working locations marked by red dots. In these regions of the world I have either made work, taught or mentored students, curated exhibitions, lectured to small and wide audiences, and as always, helped spread my belief that photography lives in all of us, whether we take the pictures, share them, or learn from them. A better world is the promise, meaning a better, kinder, and wiser planet because we can all be on the same page in a photograph.

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Arno Rafael Minkkinen: Fifty Years at Edwynn Houk Gallery(Link to another website.), January 4 – February 8, 2020.

See more of the artist's work on his site: arnorafaelminkkinen.com(Link to another website.).