DeCordova Museum is the inaugural site for Saga, the first comprehensive, large-scale overview of Minkkinen‘s germinal and influential imagery from the last three decades. Curated by A.D. Coleman and Todd Brandow as a project of the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, the exhibition will travel internationally.

Over the years Minkkinen has developed his own unique approach to self-portraiture. As A.D. Coleman writes, Minkkinen’s ongoing photographic project
“… pertains to many of the movements and issues of contemporary art and photography, among them performance art and body art, the construction of identity, and the male nude. Cumulatively, however, his images also comprise an account of an epic journey—both a physical adventure in the natural and urban world and a psychological voyage of the lone human spirit.”

Since the early 1970s, the internationally known Finnish-American photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen has been photographing his unclothed body in a wide variety of landscape and interior settings. These surreal and timeless black and white photographs are remarkable for the way in which Minkkinen maneuvers his body so that it echoes or becomes part of the land formation. From Finland to New England, from the American West to Italy and France, Minkkinen seeks sites where he can show the presence of the human spirit in nature. The photographs are all the more astonishing in that the artist does not use digital means nor does he manipulate the images in the darkroom.