Daniel Arnold On Survival, Humour, And Cultural Acclaim

photos shot by and courtesy of Daniel Arnold.

Through being a writer, I have been lucky enough to sit one and one with multiple people I would consider “heroes”.

Even though I have qualms with the concept of “heroes” and hero worship. These are people who are of big inspiration to me and that I have looked up to. I’ve never been disappointed, every last one of them has exceeded my expectations of them and who they are. To the point where the phrase ‘Never meet your heroes’ feels obsolete. None of them have been more down to earth, kind, caring and understanding than Daniel Arnold. Half way through our hour and a half call, he began giving me life advice in a way I will forever hold so deeply.

Daniel’s work was some of the first that I was introduced to when getting into photography. Instantly, I was enamoured by what he was able to capture of the New York street. Moments in time that feel almost fake. Moments that carry so much emotion and are lined with humour. Photos that he has taken while walking around New York in his pursuit of what he says is, ‘To make something every day and pile up all this proof of what an obsession looks like. A document of my emotional experience. Just me trying to make a picture of my creative mind.’ 

In the last year Daniel’s work has gone beyond the street and has been popping up in new spheres that felt rare for him to inhabit in the past. In editorial and fashion campaigns. Notably on the cover of Interview Magazine where he shot actor Austin Butler bearing a vacuum cleaner. While being a new area these photos still felt very him, I wanted to know more about his move into that world and how his street photography informed the way he shoots for hire. I reached out to Daniel to talk about his move into that world and some other questions that I have been wanting to ask him for a while.  

As of late you’ve moved more into the editorial and fashion world. How did that move arise?

Well, it was always kind of there as an interesting part of the equation. I didn’t have any responsible plan for being a photographer, I didn’t even mean to be a photographer. From the beginning there was some sort of symbiosis that I had to strike. I abruptly quit my whole life, had no source of income, and had to figure out a new way to make a living. Recently, it occurred to me that I was ten years into this incredibly lucky streak where now I have the space, authority, and confidence to really throw myself into this work.

The work and opportunities that people have been throwing at me for ten years, and that I would only do if I found them interesting. I was thinking to myself and was like ‘Okay, buddy you’re getting old, and you are in a young cool guy business you should probably take responsibility for yourself and save some money, because there are people in my life you want to provide for’. I am also very comfortable in the groove I’ve worn myself, walking around the city everyday shooting photos and basically, I felt like I needed to hire someone to force me to get out of that and be uncomfortable. So, I signed with this agency that I had been talking to for six years.

How has it been?

It’s been interesting. I’m in a position where I am working frequently enough in uncomfortable spaces, and I can’t always do a good job.

It's hard to always do a good job.

Yeah, it’s impossible. It’s always been a thing that failure, no matter how much you make it a part of your little spiel is uncomfortable, it’s hard to accept. It is a part of the process, and you must accept doing a bad job. 

It is never really easy to accept failure. Have you found shooting for work has helped you become a better photographer?

Yeah, it is a great education and has advanced me as a photographer. It has put me in a position to think about things from new angles and new depth. In the beginning I found that the fear that came with doing an assignment and working to meet someone else’s exceptions, put me in a state of mind that I really treasure. I enter this mode where I don’t even know what happened until I get the pictures back. There has always been that element to it and that feels like performance art. “Performance art” is loaded, and I wouldn’t have thought about it in those terms until I go, look back and be like ‘Damn, I am really going and putting on a show’.

Do you think your street work informed the way you shoot for hire?

There is no way I would’ve ever been able to do anything without street photography. We aren’t talking about technique; there is that, but what the street thing really did and continues to do is give me the ability to go into a place where I don’t know what to do and make something out of nothing. I’ve done that every day for so long, whether it’s good or not. I am comfortable being desperate and feeling like I might drown.

Yeah, definitely I find shooting street helps you think quickly on your feet too in a way you would never get on a set or in a studio. If you’re staying in your comfort zone forever, you’re going to lose the joy in it eventually. 

I mean that probably works for some people, but I didn’t get a photography education in pursuit of a photography career. I mean, I did work as an assistant, but it wasn’t because I was like ‘I have to work as an assistant to make these connections and move through the world’. Everything has been sort of survival and that kind of remains my only trick. Survival forces you to make interesting choices, it forces you to surprise yourself.

Survival keeps it interesting. You’ve spoken about your photos as if they are just a thing made with little intention but there always seems to be large emotional triggers within your work, especially humour. Which is something I’ve always noticed and has informed my own personal approach when shooting street photos. How important do you think humour is in street photography?

It’s as important as it is in making small talk, it’s communication. For one thing it helps in narrowing down everything. I have everything to choose from and what do I pick? I’m not just going to take a picture of everything, I’ll bore the shit out of myself. If you try to work in this involuntary way, you end up revealing your personality. If I am walking around thinking ‘What do I want to keep in the world?’ and I see something funny, I want to keep it. There are plenty of other things too, any kind of emotional trigger. If something is super depressing, I want to keep that too, because sometimes I feel super depressed. I think humour is the most valuable communication tool for connecting.

It’s nice that your use of humour has carried over into your editorial work. Shoots from the last year like the Fran Lebowitz shoot for Cultured and the Austin Butler Interview cover have that underlying humour element.

It has been a go to trick for me at work lately, the faster I can go full blown stupid, the faster it makes everyone more comfortable. It doesn’t always necessarily produce the thing that works for a client or me but for the sake of disarming the situation it works. People automatically go into these situations really seriously, everyone wants to look really good, maybe people have a certain impression of me and my work, but I am very eager every time to just throw that out the window and be like this is really stupid. Let’s be stupid, let’s have fun, what’s the stupidest thing you can think of right now.

I’m curious about how you feel about what Pickpocket has become as a book which has found cultural acclaim and resells for upwards of $300?

It’s surprising and I don’t think it’s an answer anyone would want to hear, and people would think I’m full of shit. 

I’d like to hear it. I don’t have to put it in.

No, I don’t care, you can put anything you want in.

It’s interesting talking about this idea of having resale value on yourself. 

It doesn’t mean anything to me. I don’t care. I don’t even care about the old work that much. I care about the old work in that, there is untapped potential in it to make new work. I still haven’t really begun to tinker with the language of shows and books. Sure, Pickpocket is a wonderful cultural collision, it is an incredible object, that I am so happy exists, and I am so grateful for, but it isn’t a book I made. I did the work in that book, but that book was made by somebody else. It was a group of really smart and interesting, creative people being like ‘What do we know about Daniel? How do we tell the story of Daniel, as we perceive it?’. It’s basically - how do we make a movie about a dead guy. 

The book has your annotations for each photo, that seems pretty personal.

Yeah, that was my revenge on the book. I let everything go but then at the end they asked me to do captions, so I reclaimed it. That part of the book is very much me; the rest is truly a collaboration.

If you were to make another book, would you want to do it all yourself? 

I have to. I don't know if I will because I am always really tempted and interested by a collaboration. It is such an interesting version of the game to try my stuff into the blender of someone else's perception of me and see what comes back. It is so much more interesting to me than what I could make myself, even if I don’t like it. I’ve heard many times over the past ten, twelve, fifteen years, ‘I don’t think you know what your good pictures are.’ I think that’s so interesting and it’s why I always am like ‘You go ahead’. You said you wanted to talk about my website.

Yeah, please let's talk about your website. 

The website is playing with that phenomenon, it is also relinquishing authorship and identity in a way to be like ‘Who am I to say what any of this shit means’. 

How did you come up with the idea to make the image database? 

It’s something that has been in the back of my head for a really long time. The natural source of it is that I make a huge amount of work and I have an intimate relationship with all of it, so I want it to all be accessible. I have gotten more and more meticulous and methodical about metadata. Every roll that comes in I tag the shit out of every picture, everything that I can see in the picture that I could ever imagine wanting to call up, like maybe one day I’ll want to see every picture of ‘mothers’ so I’ll tag that this one has a mother in it or maybe I want pictures of ‘red’, so I’ll tag it red. Over time I've gotten more and more obsessive with it and it’s a great editing tool.

How did the website come to be? 

It’s funny. I was having breakfast alone at a breakfast counter in the city and I heard a guy three chairs down bragging about some virtual world that he was building. I had five coffees at this point and was like ‘Fuck it’, ‘Hey guy, I have this website idea, have you ever built a website?’ He was like ‘What’s the idea?’ I told him and he was like ‘Yeah I could do that’, so he did. He ended up being really invested in the project. Turns out he knew my work and was excited to work on it. I still think it could use more fine tuning, but search engines are tough, it’s hard to make it be as specific and smart as I want it to be. 

It is such a cool idea. When I found it, I was sort of shocked at why I had never seen anything like this before. 

Well, it’s not self-promoting. In the world of websites that are meant to be like ‘This is why you should hire me or value me’ it’s a fuck you website. ‘Oh, you’re wondering what my portfolio is, this is my portfolio, figure it out’. 

It’s not like that's your only portfolio, is it? 

There’s a website I built twelve years ago and never touched again. The agency made a portfolio for me on their website. I don’t have a professional portfolio that I maintain, or I made. I don’t want it to be that way, I don’t want to present an edit and be like ‘This is the work’ that’s not the point, this isn’t the work. This is the world. 

And that makes sense with your work being the way it is, being street stuff that has been sporadic. 

Yeah, it has been sporadic, it’s my personal life, my life at home with my family, my professional life, everything goes together. I didn't learn how to be a street photographer; I didn't learn to be a photographer. There has just always been my own language, my own curiosity, and my own system of notation. I am sentimental and nostalgic, I notice when shit is funny, and I have a record of it that is almost twenty years old. It is not about finding the top hits and presenting them to say, ‘Look how valuable I am’. No, I made the world, figure it out, do whatever you want with it, it’s a game. I realised as soon as it was done that maybe it is more for me than it is for anyone else. 

Do you have something that you are most proud of with your photography work? 

Hmm, that’s an interesting question. In a stepped back kind of way, I wouldn't even necessarily say proud. I am more kind of amazed when I think about being twenty three and what I just did without even thinking. I came to New York, this place where I didn’t know anything or anybody and stumbled my way through, with no leg up or any particular advantage and just hustled. I am really amazed when I compare my daily experience of anxious, desperate fumbling, indecision to the ingenuity and courage that it took to get from twenty three year old me to forty four year old me, it’s amazing to me that it’s me and I did that.

If you could say anything to yourself at twenty three, what would it be?

I don’t think I would help him. Sure, things could be better, but I got here by accidentally making this perfect equation and so much of it is by failure, humiliation, and insecurity. So much of it. I wouldn’t spare him any of it. 

Thank you so much for giving me your time to talk.

You know, I have plenty of time to notice over the years, that it is really a privilege to talk through your shit, because you really don't know what it is until you talk through it. I know myself and my work so much better because I’ve had to have this conversation so many times, so I am always happy to have it.