The Académie des beaux-arts has announced that Finnish-American photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen will receive the prestigious Photography Award – William Klein for 2025. This lifetime achievement award, established in 2019 with support from the Chengdu Contemporary Image Museum, honors photographers of any nationality for their outstanding body of work and long-term contributions to the field of photography. The prize carries a monetary award of 120,000 euros.
The Photography Award – William Klein was created to pay tribute to the legendary photographer William Klein (1926-2022) and is presented every two years, alternating with the Prix de Photographie Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière – Académie des beaux-arts, which recognizes established photographers working or residing in France. Previous winners include Raghu Rai of India in 2019, Annie Leibovitz of the United States in 2021, and Graciela Iturbide of Mexico in 2023.
The award ceremony will take place on Friday, November 14, 2025, in the Grande salle des séances of the Palais de l'Institut de France. Laurent Petitgirard, the Permanent Secretary of the Académie des beaux-arts, and Zhong Weixing, founder of the Chengdu Contemporary Image Museum, will present the award to Minkkinen.
Minkkinen will also be the featured guest at the Planches Contact Festival, which will showcase the results of his residency at Les Franciscaines and present a comprehensive retrospective exhibition on the beach of Deauville from October 18, 2025, to January 4, 2026. Additionally, an exhibition of his work will be held at the Chengdu Contemporary Image Museum in China.
Arno Rafael Minkkinen was born in Helsinki, Finland, in 1945. When he was six years old, his parents immigrated to the United States, settling in Finntown, Brooklyn, New York. He began his academic journey studying philosophy and religion at Wagner College before graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature in 1967. His professional career started as a copywriter on Madison Avenue, where he worked on accounts for national brands including Minolta cameras.
A pivotal moment in Minkkinen's career came in 1971 when he wrote the headline "What happens inside your mind can happen inside a camera." This phrase inspired him to pursue photography professionally. He initially enrolled in a workshop with renowned photographer Diane Arbus, but when it was canceled just before it was scheduled to begin, John Benson took over and helped guide Minkkinen to find his own artistic path.
Minkkinen was accepted into the graduate program at Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied under the influential photographer Harry Callahan, earning his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1974. He went on to become an Emeritus Professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, concluding a distinguished 36-year teaching career that began in Finland from 1974 to 1976 at the Lahti Institute of Design and the Taideteolinen Korkeakoulu in Helsinki, now known as Aalto University.
His academic career included four years as Assistant Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he curated the first comprehensive exhibition of Finnish photography in America. He returned to Finnish institutions for another two-year teaching period from 1984 to 1986, during which he organized an international curation of Finnish photography that was presented in 1986 at the Theater Antique in Arles, France. In 1992, Minkkinen was appointed deputy consultant for Septembre de la Photo (better known as Finnice), overseeing a Riviera-wide exhibition featuring 28 Finnish photographers. This exhibition remains one of the largest exports of Finnish art to date.
For Minkkinen, photography serves as a medium to reveal the invisible and invites viewers to see the world through the eyes of a child. His artistic practice explores the complex relationship between the human body and nature, creating images without any subsequent digital manipulation. Working between the realms of reality and fiction, he has revolutionized the black-and-white self-portrait through striking graphic compositions in which the human body becomes a tool for creating remarkable visual constructions.
Minkkinen works entirely alone, creating his images through a combination of visual imagination and physical performance. He rarely sees what his camera captures at the moment of exposure and serves as his own assistant in nearly all of his photographic shoots. This unique approach has resulted in a distinctive body of work that challenges conventional notions of self-portraiture and landscape photography.
His photographs are included in the collections of prestigious institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Finnish National Gallery, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and The Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, among dozens of other international museums and galleries.
Throughout his career, Minkkinen has received numerous prestigious awards and honors. These include the Order of the Lion First Class in Finland (1992), the Finnish State Art Prize in Photography (2006), the Lucie Award presented at Carnegie Hall (2013), a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2015), the Pro Finlandia medal (2000), and the Honored Educator Award from the Society for Photographic Education (SPE) in 2019.
Minkkinen currently resides with his wife Sandra, his partner of 56 years, at Fosters Pond in Andover, Massachusetts. He continues to make frequent visits to Finland, where he has recently ventured into new creative territories as a first-time screenwriter and filmmaker, expanding his artistic practice beyond still photography.
