Five Photos Five Stories With Daniel Arnold
‘Somebody must have died, and all of their possessions were in a garbage can that somebody then threw all over the sidewalk, so this is not all in its time.’
‘Every time the train rumbles by, the internet in my apartment crashes for fifteen seconds.’
I met photographer Daniel Arnold at Dreamer’s Cafe in Chinatown, Manhattan, which is right off of the Manhattan Bridge, over which the Q, or the N, or the W, or the R train lumber slowly every few minutes seizing the neighborhood for a few moments with its loudness; the rumbling intrudes on people’s lives, takes the space it needs, and in Daniel’s case, knocks out his home wifi connection. There’s just something about New York City; people put up with it, people fight through it, people steal from it, people become it.
The nature of a street photographer if you’re bad at it is to obstruct someone else’ day by prioritizing yours - shoving a camera into the face of a stranger and inserting yourself into a scene without regard - taking from it what you will, and brutally, in broad daylight. The nature of a street photographer if you are good, is to steal quietly. To observe, to sneak, to cherish, to revere. Daniel Arnold’s photography isn’t obstructionist or pushy or self-interested, and doesn’t snatch, but captures with some understanding of the city and its allowance for a means of survival - whether it is plucking a fish from the river or plucking a portrait from SoHo. It is more gentlemanly than he’d like me to say and perhaps more earnest.
Curiously, Daniel does not like to provide information or context to his photography, which makes this article of his explanations a little bit of an intrusion, but so is he, and aren’t we all in a city like this?
What is this?
This is a photo of a ghost cut out of wood behind a tree in the night in Chicago. There was a period early on where I would get offered shows, and I had no interest in being like, ‘here are my ten best pictures framed on a wall,’ so I would go to the city like a week early, walk a hundred miles, take a million pictures, and show what I shot, kind of performance style.
Very gamey.
The whole thing is very gamey. That’s what hooked me. It makes everything a game, what can I collect - there’s a camera by my bed just in case. The bed is a very interesting place. Anyways, I was in Chicago, it was cold as fuck. It was so cold that my camera got locked up and broke. I don’t remember if I got a disposable or someone else’ camera - this was also a couple of of shows in, I had done this a couple of time to some success, so I came in kind of riding high, but this time the camera broke and it was freezing cold and Chicago is not a rewarding place for that time of year.
Why?
It was winter! And there’s no density, so there was nobody around. I would walk for hours and see maybe one person. It doesn’t reward a long walk at that time, you’d have to find the pocket and stay in it. This was in maybe late October or November.
Could it have been that cold, then?
I have the same doubt, like maybe I’m exaggerating it in my memory, but it was so cold that the camera stopped working. This was in like, 2014.
How many more times did you do this kind of thing?
This stunt? I think this was the last time, so two or three times. I used to feel in an outright way that everyday I was trying to make a body of work, which is insane. Wandering around in this perpetual endless way to the point of exhaustion, I’d get to a point where I’m so lost in the meditation of walking that the photography part became automatic; I wasn’t stopping with an idea, I was just doing it. The nice thing about pressure is that I can go to my job in some corny controlled fashion situation, and the deadline, the stakes - being in a world where I know that I don’t belong - it fast forwards me to this sort of auto state. You become the sum of your instincts. For me it’s much more interesting to see what my animal brain does than to execute my own ideas which are twee and embarrassing.
What is this?
This is a photo of my friend Jason Polan. He’s dead now, it sucks. This was taken in probably… well, he died in January of 2020, so this was probably in 2018? Jason is a nice reflection of the spirit - Jason had this project where he wanted to draw a portrait of every single person in New York, so he was always outside, paper and pen in hand. He did these really messy cool drawings. My Instagram profile picture is his drawing. He was a guy who, although I think we spent together on purpose maybe twice, he felt like a sibling almost, creatively. He had this same sort of irrational appetite for the minutia of the city.
Did you plan to meet up in this photo or did you just run into him?
I just ran into him on Spring and Broadway. I end up on Spring and Broadway a lot because it’s on the way to the lab. Because I’m an addict, I drop off a lot. As easily objectionable as SoHo consistently is, it’s also high-density with a lot of interesting people.
A lot of the world’s worst people.
It’s a very interesting intersection of bad actors.
The spectrum of rotten petty criminal to teenaged Italian tourists shopping at Brandy Melville.
Right, and in that matrix, you gotta love a criminal. I mean, SoHo really elevates the criminal. The proper response to SoHo is to do crime.
You know, I thought I’d move here and be among weirdos, fighting for my life, getting to be a weirdo, but I find that most of the city is normal people doing fit checks.
Yeah, a lot of it is that and it sucks, but it’s a very nice canvas to shit on the world from, or whatever. I can’t really say that that’s what I’m doing, I feel I’ve been in a very romantic relationship with it. I mean that was my Instagram relationship early on that put me where I am, it was a despicable canvas. It was such a corny backdrop and so it was easy to fuck with it.
There’s a game that I try to play, but it’s very hard to play on purpose, and I can’t say that I’ve succeeded at it more than a couple of times, but I have a few pictures where there’s a good picture happening, but I didn’t take it. I see the easy winner, but I took it from a different place, or there’s a good picture in the area but its not in front of the camera. I had this kind of concept-destroying revelation that a lot of ‘good’ photography is derivative, that are based on good pictures that already exist. I don’t want to sell my rebellion, I want to do good, but I try to put a lot of thought and energy into fucking up.
Who is this?
This is a pickpocket. I don’t wanna make this too long, but… [Daniel and I talk about buying furniture, Robert Eggleston, and working at MTV for fifteen minutes]. Anyway, when we were assembling this book (Pickpocket (2021)), they were listing off all of these people that they could get to write the intro for the book. They listed like, the top New York people that you’d ever want to do it. It felt kind of - I mean, a celebrity alone, but even more than that, a celebrity that I have no relationship with? It felt not right to me. We had a common friend who was doing a sort of doc-ish short about a pickpocket. An actual pickpocket who made his living on that in New York. So I went to the publisher and was like, ‘our friend is making this movie, can we get the pickpocket to write a one-page summary of his life?’ And they were like, ‘okay, we’ll try,’ but there was some sort of complication with logistics-
I mean, he’s a criminal admitting to being a criminal.
Yeah, I think maybe he was a reformed pickpocket…
He’s a quitter.
Yeah! He’s a quitter. But it was more about the relationship between movie people, whatever it was, I don’t know, but they couldn’t get the pickpocket to write the thing. But finally someone was like, ‘why don’t we call the book Pickpocket?’
The reason I wanted the pickpocket is because I live in this neighborhood where I see guys who hang fish on the clothes line that they fished out of the East River. There’s so much industry around here and ingenuity where people are just making life work out of what’s here, getting up early and pulling fish out of the East River, eating it and selling it, and paying their rent on that. In my self-examination of that book, there were no ideas, there was just whatever I found and caught in whatever way that makes it mine. For the most part, it’s stolen. I’m like these fishermen. So anyway, that’s the pickpocket who wouldn’t write the intro for Pickpocket.
This was Covid. This was a day where it was far enough into Covid where we were far enough into adaptations where you could feel like you could feel like in its restlessness insisting on coming back. It was a very windy day, and the air touches you in this moment of mass paranoia - to accept being touched by the air felt like this tiny revolutionary step. So I went around trying to make proof of that where I could see it - making proof of the wind. I remember there were these tulips growing and one of them grew outside of the fencing, so I took my little picture of that. You know, this is one of those pictures where the river kept being the river.
I had the experience throughout Covid where I’d be walking down the street and it’d be completely desolate, where only the most desperate people were left on the sidewalk, and then I would look at the sky which was exactly the same, and it would make me laugh every time, how ridiculous it felt to make such a big deal out of this but the world goes on. And it’s not very profound, it’s corny, I was just wanting to take photos of that shift in time on that day.
Do you not like to add dates or titles to your images when you publish them?
No, I prefer not to.
Why?
I think it ruins them. Every time I add titles or notes or times, I end up feeling weird remorse - I just think its much more interesting as a Rorschach.
