Waterline

Arno Rafael Minkkinen has been photographing himself in the nude since 1971. Now, this nearly quarter-century exploration unfolds in Waterline as a timeless landscape of the human figure amid the forces of nature. The element of water - upon which his feet race, below which his torso dives, or above which his being floats - provides the common ground for his surrealistic vision. There is no manipulation, no darkroom trickery, nothing but the single instant of the shutter and the placement of the lens.
"What happens inside your mind can happen inside a camera," Minkkinen once wrote as a copywriter on the Minolta camera account. "I am glad to have made these pictures before the advent of the digital image, at a time when the magical qualities in a photograph could still be based on the visual evidence of what really happened."
Minkkinen's ongoing collaboration with his son - from toddler to teenager - lends the photographs in Waterline a personal warmth and intimacy, while his recent self-portraits with women impart to the work an aura of mystery and elegance. A son looks ahead to adulthood as a father looks back on the adolescent passions of his own youth.
Minkkinen returns often to the sweeping Finnish lake districts, to the country where he was born and where, over the years, one foot or another reappears, if not levitating, then firmly rooted in a Finnish imagination. As Michel Tournier, the renowned French novelist, writes in his spirited and absorbing essay on Minkkinen's strange existential hieroglyphics, "Doisneau can only imagine himself in Paris, and Edward Weston in California; August Sander cannot dissociate himself from Berlin. Now it seems to us that Arno Minkkinen necessarily springs from Scandinavia, and more specifically from Finland."