Arno Rafael Minkkinen is a Finnish-American photographer. He was born in Helsinki in 1945 and emigrated to the United States in 1951. A graduate of Wagner College with a BA in English Literature, he began taking self-portraits in 1971 while working as an advertising copywriter on the Minolta camera account. Studying with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at Rhode Island School of Design, he earned his MFA in photography in 1974. Over the next thirty-five years he has been primarily engaged as a teacher, curator, and writer while continuing to devote his photographic research and energies to the self-portrait, unmanipulated images of the human figure in the natural landscape.

Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Minkkinen also serves as Docent at the University of Art & Design Helsinki and visiting professor at the Lahti Design Institute in Finland. Earlier in his teaching career he served as Assistant Professor at MIT and Visiting Artist at Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts).

Published and exhibited worldwide, Minkkinen’s work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, the Centre Pompidou and Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Musée de l’Élysée in Lausanne, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography among many others.

Six monographs have been published: Frostbite (1978), Waterline (1994, winner of the 25th Rencontres d'Arles Book Prize), Body Land (1999), SAGA: The Journey of Arno Rafael Minkkinen, 35 Years of Photographs (2005), and Homework: The Finnish Photographs, 1973 to 2008 and Swimming in the Air (both 2008). SAGA premiered at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln in 2005. The 120-print retrospective toured to Romania, Slovakia, Finland, Italy, China as well as Canada and returns to America in 2009.

Six galleries represent Minkkinen's work: Robert Klein Gallery in Boston, Barry Friedman Ltd. and Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York, Fay Gold Gallery in Atlanta, Galerie Agathe Gaillard in Paris, Galerie Anhava in Helsinki, and SEE + Gallery in Beijing.

Recently elected to the National Board of the Society of Photographic Education, Minkkinen was conferred knighthood with the First Class Order of the Lion Medal by the Finnish government in 1992 and awarded the Finnish State Art Prize in Photography in 2006. He lives with his wife Sandra on Fosters Pond in Andover, Massachusetts.