A classically trained musician since college, Chehalis Hegner utilizes photography, video, and other media and brings to her work a touch of the performative and theatrical. Incorporating props and often gloved hands, her work deals with self-imaging and portraiture as well as gender issues. In the series here, she deals with healing and photography, including the relationship between model, photographer, and the restorative potential of the medium itself.

Hegner received her MFA from the Art Institute of Boston (Boston, MA) in photography and video in 2005. Her exhibitions in Greater Boston include Faces of Boston at the Boston City Hall, Hand Made Cinema at the New England Institute of Art, and the 1999 PRC Members' Exhibition, "Celebrating New Technologies." She is currently an instructor and coordinator of photography at Plymouth State University (Plymouth, NH).

Chehalis Hegner

During the act of making photographs, I have always had a sense that a fundamental kind of healing was taking place—and many of my subjects have responded by saying that they felt transformed by having been seen and photographed. I believe that this symbolic anointing occurs because we are so rarely honestly seen. I believe this is partially caused by the way society structures life as a primarily fragmented experience, based on various forms of alienation, rather than on community building and sharing.

In the process, I also address my own need to understand my truth as I see it, as it is revealed while savoring the fragments of time punctuated by the sound of the shutter releasing.

Arno Rafael Minkkinen

Arno Rafael Minkkinen became a member of the PRC shortly after it was founded in the 1970s. At the time, Minkkinen had just graduated from Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI) with his MFA in photography in 1974 and taught in the Creative Photography Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA), a position that he held until 1981. During his time in New England, he served as the book review editor during the first year of the PRC's publication, VIEWS: A New England Journal of Photography, and as editor during its second year.

Minkkinen returned to Boston to pursue advertising copywriting at Quinn & Johnson/BBDO for two years and then moved to Finland to teach. Since 1988, Minkkinen has been part of the Art Department at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell (Lowell, MA). Known for his work fusing his own body with nature's forms, he is currently working on a new book, Kotityö, ("homework" in Finnish) which features work he created while in Finland. Minkkinen's work can be seen in major collections such as Center for Creative Photography (Tucson, AZ), High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA), and Musée de l'élysée (Lausanne, Switzerland). His publications include three monographs: Frostbite: Photographs (1978), Waterline (1994), Body Land (1999). A retrospective of his work, Saga: The Journey of Arno Rafael Minkkinen, was organized by the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography (FEP) and shown at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park (Lincoln, MA), and is currently traveling internationally.