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Past SPE Annual Conferences

2012 SPE Annual ConferenceSpeakers

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Arno Rafael Minkkinen

Friday, March 23, 2012 @ 1:00pm, Grand Ballroom A

"Camera Shy: Public and Private Intimacy from Scandinavia"

Arno Rafael Minkkinen is a Finnish-American photographer. Born in Helsinki in 1945, he immigrated to the United States in 1951. Majoring in English Literature at Wagner College, Minkkinen became an advertising copywriter on Madison Avenue. While working on the Minolta camera account, he began taking self-portraits in 1970. An MFA degree in photography was awarded in 1974 from Rhode Island School of Design where he studied with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind.

Over the past four decades, Minkkinen has been primarily engaged as a teacher, curator, and writer while continuing to devote his photographic research and energies to the self-portrait: unmanipulated images of the naked human figure in the natural and urban landscape.

Published and exhibited worldwide, Minkkinen's work can be found in the collections of the Centre Pompidou and Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Musée de l'Élysée in Lausanne, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography among many others.

Minkkinen's work is represented by ten galleries worldwide: Robert Klein Gallery in Boston, Barry Friedman Ltd. and Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York, Galerie Agathe Gaillard in Paris, Galerie Valérie Bach in Bruxelles, Photo & Contemporary in Torino, Galerie Anhava in Helsinki,
in Focus Fotografie in Köln, Germany, Galerie Clairefontaine in Luxembourg, and SEE + Artspace Gallery in Beijing, China.

A national board member of the Society of Photographic Education, Minkkinen was conferred the First Class Order of the Lion Medal by the Finnish government in 1992 and awarded the Finnish State Art Prize in Photography in 2006.

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