For more than forty years, Arno Rafael Minkkinen (born 1945 in Finland) has been photographing his body immersed in nature. What happens inside your mind can happen inside a camera, a line he wrote as a copywriter in the 70s, now reads as a premonition of his artistic career.
What you see happening in the image happened in front of the lens. There is no image manipulation of any kind, and even the shutter is released by the artist himself (sometimes pressing the bulb release with his teeth underwater). Even though the imagination can pre-visualise a thousand possibilities, for any idea to succeed it has to be anchored in the reality of the moment of its making.
In 35 years of photography, I have learned that everything is simple when you trust the circumstances.
Arno Rafael Minkkinen
In 2018 Loewe Perfumes commissioned Minkkinen for their campaign photography, and a clever art director decided to pair his images with the flowers of Karl Blossfeldt (see this post). At the end of the post you find additional stills from this project.
Loewe Perfumes 2018
Directed by Arno Rafael Minkkinen
Art direction by The Style Council
More stills from the Loewe campaign:
