Lecture by Arno Rafael Minkkinen

Arno Rafael Minkkinen: unplugged, as always
Thursday, February 28, 2008
7pm
BU's Photonics Center, Auditorium 206, 8 St. Mary's Street, Boston
$10 Members/$15 Non-Members/$5 Full-time Students/Free for Students of Institutional Members ( PLEASE PURCHASE YOUR TICKET @ PHOTONICS CENTER) And get there soon so you wont be without a ticket!

Please join us for this special lecture, as we present a talk by internationally renowned photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen. The artist's witty and instantly recognizable work, in which he inserts himself into the landscape?often in impossible poses?explores parallels between the physical environment and the human landscape. Knighted in his Finnish homeland, Minkkinen has long resided in Massachusetts. This is, however, the first time the artist has delivered a public lecture in the city of Boston.

The artist's photography and writings have been collected, exhibited, and published across the globe. A mid-career retrospective of his work, SAGA: The Journey of Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Thirty-Five Years of Photographs premiered at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in 2005 and has since traveled to numerous venues including the Bucharest Museum of Contemporary Art; the Lianzhou International Photography Festival in China; and the Salo Art Museum in Finland. The show moves next to Palazzo Magnani in Reggio Emilia, Italy and the Winnipeg Art Gallery in Canada. Minkkinen studied with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at the Rhode Island School of Design, and is currently Professor of Art and head of the photography program at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. He is represented by the Robert Klein Gallery in Boston. The artist will be available to sign copies of SAGA , which will be available for sale.

From Arno...

It began one summer afternoon in the foothills of the Catskills at a place called Apeiron, the hippie-run workshop that fueled photo majors on granola and D-76 in the time of Maggie Mae and "Old Man, take a look at my life, I'm a lot like you were."

Well, here I am, old hat myself; still jolted by the magic of unmanipulated split-second exposures and sweet transformations in the birth trays of the darkroom.

Returning from Apeiron?where I had hoped to study with Diane Arbus in the summer she left this world?my wife could not recognize me.

?What happened to you??

In answer, I showed a self-portrait I had made, an image of me standing naked before a mirror like someone at the foot of an open grave.

John Benson, my instructor, had told me to take a day off. "No more cows, no more barns, or back to your [advertising] typewriter you go."

Seeing the self-portrait, friends later would exclaim: ?That's heavy, dude!? I was hooked.

We all have our own Apeiron to call home, where for the first time we discover how to make the risk visible. My tactic was simple: let the camera take the picture. Not many folks worked that way back in 1971. Finding out what happened after the fact was awesome.

Back at the agency I wrote a headline for Minolta: "What happens inside your mind can happen inside a camera."

I begin my lecture there and invite you to share in the journey. I need music, so you'll hear some good tunes for sure. And if you can sit through the hour or so, there'll be stories from RISD days to the fjords of Norway, all wrapped into 36 years of photography.

This lecture is sponsored by the Land Fund of the Polaroid Foundation

www.arnorafaelminkkinen.org

IMAGE CREDITS:
TOP: © Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Fosters Pond, 1989. Courtesy of the Robert Klein Gallery. BOTTOM: © Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Dalsnibba, Geiranger Fjord, Norway, 2006. Courtesy of the Robert Klein Gallery.