Internationally renowned photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen—also a screenwriter—takes us behind the scenes of his Finnish American journey with a love story from war-torn Helsinki to the streets of Brooklyn and beyond.

FIVE DECADES BEHIND THE LENS traces the journey of Arno Rafael Minkkinen in an autobiographical feature film beginning from his birth with a double-cleft palate that becomes an immediate firewall between him and his beauty queen mother to his coming-of-age adventures as a Suomalainen poika in Brooklyn. “You don’t have to go chasing after girls,” his mother says. “Your father has a better dream for you, to become a missionary in Japan.” But that strategy falls prey to earthbound desires soon after he enters Wagner College on Staten Island breaking his father’s heart. Upon graduation a Madmen copywriter gig on Madison Avenue working on a camera account catapults his career to photography.
80% fact, 80% fiction, the two-hour narrative feature, Draw Me a Dream, is that firewall, a mother and son, beauty and beast love story, from her first words when he’s born to her last breath when he rushes back from a photo shoot in Colorado—driving days and nights—to be at her bedside in Finntown. Will the cleft between mother and son ever heal? Only if love is stitched in the scars.

Viewing family album photographs along with an 8-minute demo, FINNFEST audiences will have an opportunity to watch “a slide show trailer” seen and heard in lectures around the country and the world to check their own stories and gain a greater understanding of the high stakes involved with being an immigrant coming to America, as much as we can be immigrants from our parents. The 45-minute slide show begins with an overview of Minkkinen’s award-winning, unmanipulated self-portraits in nature and urban settings. Opportunities for questions and a book signing follows the presentation.

PRESENTER

Arno Rafael Minkkinen is a Finnish American photographer, essayist, educator, screenwriter, and curator with well over 100 solo shows and 200 group exhibitions in galleries and museums worldwide. Shooting locations include 30 countries and 31 American States. He holds Master of Fine Arts degree from Rhode Island School of Design, has taught at MIT, Aalto University in Helsinki, and is currently Emeritus Professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Major monographs include Waterline (Marval, Aperture, and Otava), winner of the 1995 Grand Prix du Livre at 25th Rencontres d’Arles); SAGA: The Journey of Arno Rafael Minkkinen: Thirty-Five Years of Photographs (Chronicle Books); Homework: The Finnish Photographs (Like, Helsinki); and Minkkinen (Kehrer) which won the German Photobook Prize for Best Monograph of the Year 2019 | 2020.

Minkkinen’s works are held in over 75 prominent museum and institutional collections worldwide, such as the Musée d’art moderne in Paris, the Musée de l’Élysée in Switzerland, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the Finnish National Art Museum, the MFA in Boston and MFA Houston, the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Minkkinen’s awards include an NEA regional grant, a Mass Cultural Council Grant, the Finnish State Art Prize, and the Order of the Lion First Class medal of knighthood from Finland. More recently, the Lucie Award in Outstanding Achievement for Fine Art, the Society for Photographic Education’s regional and national Honored Educator awards, the Pro Finlandia medal from the President of Finland, a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, and a Wagner College Distinguished Alumni.