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’s camera - I had done this a couple of times already to some success, so I came in kind of riding high, but this time the camera broke and it was freezing cold and Chicago doesn’t really reward my approach, especially at that time of year.

Why?

It was winter and there’s no density. There was nobody around. I would walk for hours and see maybe one person. Midwest winter doesn’t reward a long walk, you’d have to find the pocket and stay in it. 

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 t used to be 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 so lost in the meditation of walking that the photography part became automatic; I wasn’t stepping out with an idea, I was just going. 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 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. It’s the worst. This was taken in probably… well, he died in January of 2020, so this was probably in 2018? Jason is a nice incarnation 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 really messy drawings. My Instagram profile picture is his drawing. He was a guy who, although I think we spent time together on purpose maybe twice, he felt like a sibling almost, creatively. He had the same sort of irrational appetite for the minutiae 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 film a LOT. As easily objectionable as SoHo can be, 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 fit checks, but it’s a very nice lookout to shit on the world from? I can’t really say that that’s what I’m doing, I have a very romantic relationship with the city. But that was my Instagram instinct early on that put me where I am. It was a despicable canvas. It was such a dull backdrop, which made it easy to fuck with it. 

There’s a game that I try to play where there’s a good picture happening, but I don’t take it. I see the easy winner, but I shoot from a different place, like there’s a good picture in the frame but it’s not in front of my camera. I had a destructive revelation that ‘good photography’ is derivative, that ‘good pictures’ are based on other good pictures that already exist. I don’t want to oversell my rebellion, I do want to do good, but I also put a lot of thought and energy into fucking up.

Who is this?

That’s a pickpocket. I don’t wanna make this too long, but… [Daniel and I talk about buying furniture, William Eggleston, and working at MTV for fifteen minutes]. Anyway, when we were assembling the book (Pickpocket (2021)), the publishers were listing off all the people who they could get to write an intro, like the top New York people that you’d ever want. It felt kind of uhhh - I mean, a celebrity alone, but even more than that, a celebrity that I have no relationship with - it felt not right to me. I had a friend who was doing a doc-ish short about a pickpocket. An actual pickpocket who made his living that way in New York. So I went to the publisher and said hey ‘our friend is making this movie, can we get the pickpocket to do a page that’s just a day in his life?’ And they tried but there was some logistical complication-

I mean, he’s a criminal admitting to being a criminal.

Yeah, but he was a reformed pickpocket…

He’s a quitter.

Yeah a quitter! But it was more about relationships between movie people I think, ego stuff probably, but anyway when they couldn’t get the pickpocket to write the thing, somebody suggested that we just call the book Pickpocket. Perfect! 

There are guys in my neighborhood who hang fish on their clotheslines. Fish that they fished out of the East River. There’s so much industry and ingenuity in the city, where people are just getting by on scavenging, waking up early and pulling fish out of the river, eating it, selling it, paying rent with it. It was important to me to acknowledge that there weren’t traditional ‘ideas’ in my book, it was a collection of what I found and caught in whatever way that makes it mine. For the most part, it’s scavenged or stolen. I’m like the fishermen. Looking at that book, I felt like a pickpocket. So anyway, that guy in the picture, Willfred Rose, he’s the pickpocket who didn’t write the intro for Pickpocket. The movie about him is called Shotplayer, made by my friends Sam Shainberg and Daniel Zuniga.

This was Covid. It was far enough into Covid that we had adapted a bit and you could feel the city’s restlessness, like it was beginning to insist on coming back. It was also a very windy day and, in that very paranoid time, even allowing yourself to be touched by the air felt like a tiny revolutionary step forward. 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 behind a chain and one tulip in the cluster had craned around to stand outside of the chain, so I took my little picture of that. You know, and 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, only the most desperate people were left on the sidewalk, and then I would look at the sky which was exactly the same as ever, and it would make me laugh every time, how ridiculous it felt to participate in this giant human melodrama while the world just went on indifferent. Anyway the pics don’t feel very profound, maybe kinda corny, but I was just wanting a little proof 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 timestamps, I end up feeling weird remorse - I just think they’re much more interesting as Rorschachs.