Arno Rafael Minkkinen, winner of the Prix de Photographie de l'Académie des beaux-arts - William Klein 2025.
International recognition for an artist celebrated in Deauville as part of the Planches Contact Festival
The City of Deauville, Planches Contact Festival and Les Franciscaines are delighted to announce that the Prix de Photographie de l'Académie des beaux-arts - William Klein 2025 has been awarded to Arno Rafael Minkkinen, guest of honour at this 16th edition.
This prestigious award crowns a major career, saluting the artistic and spiritual commitment of a photographer whose work, for over fifty years, has explored the links between the body, landscape and nature.
A key figure in contemporary photography, Arno Rafael Minkkinen is at the heart of the Planches Contact Festival's 2025 programme, with two major exhibitions and an exceptional meeting with the public.
A unique resonance between Deauville and the Académie des Beaux-Arts, between institutional recognition and artistic celebration.
Two exhibitions in Deauville: a dialogue between intimacy and immensity
The Franciscaines are devoting a brand new exhibition to his work in residence, Intimate Equations, on show from 18 October 2025 to 4 January 2026, while a monumental retrospective of his work will be displayed on the beach at Deauville.
Through these two complementary proposals, Minkkinen invites visitors to take an inner, sensory journey.
Since the early 1970s, Arno Rafael Minkkinen has been staging his own body in nature. His work, always produced without manipulation or retouching, is a silent dialogue between man and the elements. With his new series, produced during a residency in Normandy, he continues the dialogue that runs through all his work: that between man and the elements. In the landscapes of the Normandy coast, his body blends in like an extension of the shore, a fleeting silhouette absorbed by the light, a link between human fragility and the strength of the natural world.
An immersion in the intimacy of an artist who makes each image an act of revelation. True to the spirit of the Planches Contact Festival, it celebrates photography as a space for exchange, reflection and freedom.
The Académie des Beaux-Arts Photography Prize - William Klein: a tribute to an exceptional career
Created in 2019 by the Academy of Fine Arts, with the support of the Chengdu Contemporary Image Museum, the William Klein Photography Prize rewards a photographer every two years for their body of work and commitment to photography.
The €120,000 prize is a tribute to William Klein (1926-2022), an emblematic figure of photographic modernity.
After Raghu Rai (India), Annie Leibovitz (United States) and Graciela Iturbide (Mexico), the prize is awarded in 2025 to Arno Rafael Minkkinen.
The official ceremony will take place on Friday 14 November 2025 in the Grande salle des séances of the Palais de l'Institut de France, in the presence of Laurent Petitgirard, Permanent Secretary of the Académie des beaux-arts, and Zhong Weixing, founder of the Chengdu Contemporary Image Museum.
This recognition confirms Minkkinen's central place in the history of contemporary photography and underlines the universal scope of his work, now celebrated in Deauville.
A timeless artistic journey
Born in Helsinki in 1945, Arno Rafael Minkkinen lives and works in Andover (Massachusetts).
For over half a century, he has devoted himself to a body of work based on the nude self-portrait, in direct dialogue with nature. Without digital manipulation, he photographs his body in wild environments, in search of a primitive and universal truth.
His work, carried out in over 30 countries and 30 American states, has earned him over 100 exhibitions worldwide.
His work can be found in the collections of MoMA (New York), the Centre Pompidou (Paris) and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.
A unique encounter with the photographer
For the inaugural weekend of the Planches Contact Festival, Arno Rafael Minkkinen will be at Deauville from 23 to 26 October 2025.
The public will be able to meet him for a one-off discussion:
Saturday 25 October - 4pm
La Chapelle – Les Franciscaines
Meeting with Arno Rafael Minkkinen - Intimacy and landscape
>>> Information and booking
The photographer will be looking back over sixty years of creative work, combining the body, landscape and introspection.
A major figure in contemporary photography, Minkkinen will share his career, which began in the 1970s, and his approach to self-portraiture, which is at once poetic, physical and deeply spiritual.
His images, produced without artifice or retouching, are the result of a silent dialogue between man and the territories through which he passes.
Between vulnerability and strength, her photographs reveal the beauty of a world where the intimate and the vast merge.