Mikkel Aaland was born on 1952 and is a Norwegian-American photographer, based in San Francisco and Norway.
20 Facts About Mikkel Aaland
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Mikkel Aaland is known for work in the early days of digital photography, as well as his twelve books on photography.
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Mikkel Aaland is best known for his 1978 book Sweat, an illustrated history of sweat bathing.
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Mikkel Aaland was born in San Francisco and grew up in nearby Livermore, California.
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Mikkel Aaland's Norwegian born father worked as a scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory research facility.
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Mikkel Aaland was an Eagle Scout who attended Livermore High School, where he played football.
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Mikkel Aaland graduated from California State University, Chico with a major in photojournalism and was an All-American swimmer on the NCAA Division II championship team.
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Mikkel Aaland continues to be an active proponent and historian of sweat bathing.
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Mikkel Aaland published his second nonfiction book, County Fair: Portraits after spending nine years traveling the United States visiting county fairs.
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Mikkel Aaland contributed articles and photos for other publications such as American Photographer, FOTO, American Photo, Digital Creativity, Newsweek, The Washington Post, Popular Science, and Wired.
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Mikkel Aaland was one of the first to write about digital photography.
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Mikkel Aaland was the co-host of the Nordic Light International Festival of Photography between 2011 and 2018.
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Mikkel Aaland acted as an unpaid adviser to the development of both the alpha, beta, and final versions of the Adobe Photoshop Elements application.
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Mikkel Aaland followed up that book the same year with Photoshop Lightroom 2 Adventure: Mastering Adobe's Next-generation Tool for Digital Photographers, which brought professional photographers to Tasmania to show users how photographers work with the Lightroom 2 software.
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Mikkel Aaland's most recent book, The River in My Backyard, is an illustrated memoir exploring his family history, the murder of his father, and his pilgrimage to Mount Kailash.
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Mikkel Aaland is currently working on a project that will honor Marker.
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In 2014, Mikkel Aaland organized the Perfect Sweat Summit in San Francisco, bringing together 50 international experts on sweat bathing.
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Mikkel Aaland is co-host of the travel documentary series, Perfect Sweat, which combines his career-long interests in photography, travel, and sweat bathing.
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Mikkel Aaland is an honorary member of the International Sauna Association and the British Sauna Society and a co-founder and board member of the Norwegian Sauna Association.
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Mikkel Aaland set up saunas for first responders during the January 2025 Southern California wildfires.