Daniel Arnold: The New York Flow
You Are What You Do, a new monograph by Daniel Arnold, one of the most visible and blunt voices in contemporary street photography, is a non-romantic’s love confession to New York City.
By Gaia Squarci. Photographs by Daniel Arnold.
The book offers an accurate portrait of New York, a city that clings to a mischievous zest for life even at its most punishing moments. Shameless, hardened, excessive, profoundly incoherent. Through his gaze, Daniel Arnold isolates moments so ordinary we usually pass them by, then reclaims them as images that surprise and provoke. He turns his attention to scenes that shuffle the cards, those that make us think: “ that’s not the right emotion for this circumstance, or, this action doesn’t belong here.”
Using photography’s power to decontextualize, the photographer exposes how destabilising it is when reality refuses to align with our prewritten narratives. Throughout the book’s flow, references to art history and past photographers surface in the most banal situations, appearing in ways one least expects.
Reflective frames sit alongside abrasive ones cutting across every social layer, from celebrities and Central Park apartments to people sleeping on the street. What persists, even in the driest or most absurd images, is empathy. Turning the pages, it becomes clear that Arnold isn’t just observing the tragicomic, unresolved, and often nonsensical lives pulsating around New York. He is moving in the same current himself.
The book You Are What You Do is published by Loose Joints and available at the price of 54$.
