Persons Projects is happy to present the new volume of The Helsinki School: The Nature of Being, Vol. 6. The publication has been launched Saturday 7 November during Paris Photo Fair 2019.

It concentrates on bringing together the various approaches used by the School’s representatives to conceptualize nature visibly. The stated goal is not to limit oneself to purely physical depictions of animals, plants, and landscapes. Nature ought to be expressed through a di¤erent type of unit and with a new way of gauging time. Days, months, and seasons become the points of crystallization for time. Thus, the photographs reflect a Nordic sense about feelings of loneliness, jealousy, or desire. The works provide photographic insight into the complex horizon of emotions that characterize our individual views of nature. They do not portray landscape as such, but the world in which we live.
Since the 1990s the name Helsinki School has been used to describe a group of fine art photographers who studied, taught, or graduated from the Aalto University’s School of Art, Design and Architecture. The term unites a consistent conceptual approach.

Publisher: Kehrer Verlag

Publishing Date: 2019

Format: 17 x 22,5 cm, Cloth hardcover with ribbon bookmark

Pages: 288

Texts by: Keith F. Davis, Vicki Goldberg, Arno Rafael Minkkinen

Graphic Design: Leo Karhunen

ISBN: 978-3-86828-943-5

Time Atlas weaves together images from a variety of sources, from intimate personal archives to Internet imagery, old encyclopaedias, newspapers, guidebooks and manuals. Following an idiosyncratic visual and intuitive logic, Niina Vatanen combines all the different materials creating many new and surprising connections. Inspired by encyclopaedias, Vatanen organizes pictures loosely with thematic categories. She is focusing especially on questions concerning time and our perception of it, and exploring how visual memory, personal experience, and history intertwine. Niina Vatanen is an artist working with photographs, text and archive material. Her works have been on display in numerous galleries, museums and photo festivals in Finland and abroad since 2006. Niina Vatanen has published two books with Kehrer Verlag: A Room’s Memory / Huoneen muisti (2013) and Archive Play (2014).

Publisher: Kehrer Verlag

Publishing Date: 2019.

Format: 16,5 x 24 cm, Soft Cover

Pages: 128

Graphic Design: Anni Leppälä, Tuomo Rainio, Liisa Seppo

ISBN: 978-3-86828-942-8

Anni Leppälä’s motives derive from memories, loss, longing, and early adolescence, seeking for an experience of connection and closeness but also for the act of recognizing something vaguely familiar through the images. Things are often veiled, hidden or turning away, but are in their own sphere of intense, remote closeness. Photographs transform their subjects and evoke a feeling of sudden recognition, that is not visible on the surface. The connections between the images are essential for Anni Leppälä’s work. The narrations are not linear but can proceed to various directions and dimensions. The layout of the book refers to this way of working – images are overlapping each other, covering and intersecting with each other.

Publisher: Kehrer

Publishing Date: 2019.

Format: 27 x 30,5 cm, Cloth hardcover with dust jacket

Pages: 330

Texts by: Keith F. Davis, Vicki Goldberg, Arno Rafael Minkkinen

Graphic Design: Kehrer Design und Arno Rafael Minkkinen

Language: English

ISBN: 978-3-86828-922-0

Working with the body in natural and urban landscapes—without assistants and without manipulation—Minkkinen’s self-portraiture stands as one of genre’s longest,  nonstop continuities in the history of photography.

This monograph is spanning five decades of work by the acclaimed Finnish-American photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen (b. 1945).  The 330-page hardcover book depicts over 270 images since 1969 to the present with important works from all 50 years. More than half of the images are largely unpublished, including over 100 recent works since 2005, with numerous discoveries from the 1980s and 1990s, plus significant groundbreaking images from the early 1970s, years before the self-portrait entered the mainstream of contemporary photo-graphy.

Whether he is working along lakeshores or beaches, in cities or forests, from majestic mountaintops or buried in the snow, Minkkinen aims to create a balance between the naked human form and the natural and urban worlds wherein we exist, reminding us that we are foremost beings without clothes. the results can be surreal, spiritual, and transformative, often tinged with a profound sense of humor. Photographed in nearly 30 countries and 20 American States, the comprehensive book also operates as a kind of artistic diary, divided into ten thematic chapters, each with a preface written by Minkkinen, as well as a closing memoir titled Voyage of the Self.

Published and exhibited worldwide, Arno Rafael Minkkinen’s works are held in over 75 prominent collections including among others, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Musée de l'Élysée, Lausanne; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.