On Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Nick Brandt and the eye of the critic
We’re pleased that NRK and art critic Mona Pahle Bjerke reviewed Oslo Negativ, giving attention both to our presentation of Arno Rafael Minkkinen and to Nick Brandt’s Nick Brandt - Underpass with Elephants (Lean Back, Your Life is on Track) 2015, shown in Fotografiska Oslo’s Passion for Photography, drawn from the Møller Collection.
The review raises a question worth taking seriously. In a world flooded with beautiful images, what makes a photograph matter?
Bjerke opens with the central challenge of art photography: lifting an image beyond a mere record of reality, and creating something fresh in a medium where almost everything has already been seen.
She grants that Minkkinen has a clear project and a distinctive voice, but finds the visual twist in many of his images too easy to anticipate. She also stops in front of Narragansett (1973), a photograph in which Minkkinen screams out into a vanishing perspective, and writes, “There is truly nothing obvious about this composition.”
We agree. We’d also like to offer some context.
Minkkinen began photographing his own body in the landscape in the early 1970s. His lineage runs through his teachers Minor White and Harry Callahan, but Minkkinen turned the camera on himself. He works without digital manipulation or assistants, usually with a cable release or the self-timer, giving himself only seconds to get into position.
An arm becomes a branch, a leg becomes part of a lake’s edge. Over fifty years, that language has travelled far beyond him and has been borrowed, echoed and absorbed into the visual culture we all now swim in.
Perhaps that is the paradox of an original voice. When ideas succeed, they become familiar, and familiarity can easily be mistaken for cliché. Perhaps the “visual twist” we think we recognise today is, in part, something Minkkinen helped teach us to see.
The same review describes Brandt’s photograph as a powerful work. In her text, the context is fully laid out: the method, the years of return to the same land, the cost of urbanisation to animals and people alike. With the story in place, the image lands.
That, to us, is the real lesson.
In an age of image overload, the photograph alone is rarely enough. History, process and intention are part of the work, and it’s a gallery’s job to bring them into the room.
So we’d answer the question raised elsewhere in the review, “beautiful, but so what?”, with an invitation to our readers. Come and stand in front of the photographs at Oslo Negativ, and take your time. Read the texts provided by the galleries. Ask the gallerists. Speak with the artists present. There is no such thing as a stupid question.
"Be curious. Not Judgemental."
-Walt Witman
Oslo Negativ runs at the Nasjonalgalleriet until 25 October.
Ellen-K Willas, WILLAS contemporary
Nick Brandt - Underpass with Elephants (Lean Back, Your Life is on Track) 2015