Kaupo Kikkas: The Luminous Image

Kaupo Kikkas is a fine art and portrait photographer who is especially articulate about his craft and his vision. He received formal training in photography at Finland’s Visual Arts Institute, but he attributes his award-winning classical music portraits to his education in clarinet, sax, and voice.

He has concentrated on fine art photography for many years. Although based in Northern Europe, he frequently works in London, Berlin and in the US, as well annual projects in the Amazon rain forest.

His personal projects include a study of graveyards, a portrait series of shale miners, and images of a lost cinema in the Egyptian desert, which received wide exposure in the international media. More recently his series Ansel resulted in a book and an exhibit in several locations, including at the Arvo Pärt Centre.

Kikkas is also known for taking some of the most celebrated and most reproduced images of Arvo Pärt. He has photographed a number of book- and classical music album covers, and his work often appears in magazines.

When not working he can be found camping (and photographing) in Lapland. He occasionally still picks up a saxophone and, after a few drinks, has been known to sing.

Kaupo Kikkas and I became immediate friends when we first met in 2017. We have communicated and met on numerous occasions since then, and recorded this episode of Luminous in person in October 2021, out in the forest just after a sunrise hike through the bog-lands of central Estonia.