Minkkinen
We spent the afternoon of New Years Eve at the Decordova, seeing a huge collection by Finnish photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen. Minkkinen travels all over, and then takes pictures of himself nude against the landscape. The images are often elaborate visual puns -- feet over the abyss, or head underwater, or quotations from Adams or Stieglitz with a bit of the artist's anatomy thrown in for good measure. Others are experiences in themselves, like the series of the artist lying on snow and ice.
![Minkkinen](../elements/Minkkinen.jpg)
Minkkinen, interestingly enough, keeps elaborate notebooks in which he sketches what he intended to do with each image. Often, the image won't actually do what he wants -- he concocts these spontaneously, he doesn't travel with a crew, and so things don't always turn out quite right -- so the sketchbook reminds him of things to try again, somewhere new.
Minkinnen is hard on himself -- he seldom shows a lot of the body, and when he does, it's often an uncomfortable body -- which may be one reason I found his occasional figures studies of women in the landscape made a pleasant change.