Photographer Uses His Own Nude Body to Create Surreal Worlds

Arno Raffael Minkkinen, a photographer based on the East Coast in the U.S., has spent the last 40 years creating surreal self-portrait photos in which his nude body becomes an element of the landscapes that surround him.

What’s even more striking about his extraordinary compositions is that they are all real, which is impressive given that some of his photos have him lying in or even under the snow. Minkkinen prides himself on working without Photoshop. “Some of my pictures might look simple, but in reality they can test the limits of what a human body is capable of or willing to risk,” he writes on his website. “I began decades before Photoshop was invented. What you see happening in the frame of my image happened inside the viewfinder of my camera.”