ARNO RAFAEL MINKKINEN

“BUILDING A LIFETIME 

VISION IN PHOTOGRAPHY”

Imagine a piece of string the length of your arm span. Call it 30-years of photographic endeavour, during which you devoted ten years to landscape photography, five to portraiture, and the rest shooting travel destinations. That´s an admirable achievement by any standard, especially to the audience who knows and loves your work. But what about the audience you don´t know? How do you reach out to them, assuming of course that expanding your audience is also part of your mission?

Which gets us back to that piece of string. And the portfolio review tables where you get pretty much the same response: your work is all over the place. Or only one portion of it, usually project oriented, stands out. That 30-year piece of string seems much shorter now. Your best work is lodged in a project from the past. What´s the line from Bruce Springsteen about runaway dreams?

In this workshop, we are going to move our concentration from subject matter — what you photograph — to how and why you see it that way. Using various methodologies and historical examples, we´ll seek to discover your way of encountering the world so that a pathway emerges, so that you are no longer tied to subject matter or projects, but able to bring a unique vision to everything you wish to explore and uncover. The pictures will begin to accumulate, always the same, and yet always different. The same camera. But a new photographer with a new sense of purpose. You just have to place your trust in three entities: your instructor, your camera, and yourself.