Minkkinen is a Finnish-American photographer, born in Helsinki, Finland in 1945 and emigrated to the United States in 1951. He graduated Wagner College with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature, then he began taking self-portraits in 1971 while working as an advertising copywriter on Madison Avenue in New York. Later he began studying with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at Rhode Island School of Design, where he earned his Master of Fine Arts degree in photography in 1974. Over the past four decades, Minkkinen has been engaged as a teacher, curator, and writer while continuing to devote his photographic research and energies to the self-portrait: capturing self-portraits of his nude body in natural surroundings. Minkkinen fully merges his limbs and torso like a chameleon, blurring the lines between where the world ends and his body begins. The methods used to create these bold and uninhibited shots pre-date the use of Photoshop by decades, instead relying on a simple 9-second shutter release that allows Minkkinen to quickly pose for each shot. He usually works completely alone, and won’t let anyone else look through his camera’s viewfinder, lest they instead be labelled ‘the photographer.’ What may appear as a simply composed photo with fortuitous timing, is often the result of Minkkinen taking dangerous risks.
Though surrealism was a major influence on Minkkinen, his work reverses John Coplans's body studies -- where Coplans predicates his photographs on removing his own flesh from any context, Minkkinen is all about placing his within a context. Additionally Bill Brandt's nudes, with their distortions of form and scale, clearly inform his work. And in his sleek abstracting of the human form, Minkkinen can seem like a photographic Brancusi.
Though surrealism was a major influence on Minkkinen, his work reverses John Coplans's body studies -- where Coplans predicates his photographs on removing his own flesh from any context, Minkkinen is all about placing his within a context. Additionally Bill Brandt's nudes, with their distortions of form and scale, clearly inform his work. And in his sleek abstracting of the human form, Minkkinen can seem like a photographic Brancusi.