Fleeting Moments, Timeless Truths: A Talk with Daniel Arnold

• As the oldest of six kids, Daniel Arnold understood by the age of 11 or 12 that he would need to create his own world, entertaining himself while concealing his struggles and ambitions. He chose to only share fully formed ideas, appearing effortless and free from struggle.
• At just 23, the Milwaukee native arrived in New York City where he found a job writing for Viacom.
• Having grown up in a big family, he understood the value of fleeting moments captured through photography and found himself as a storyteller and a keeper of life’s precious and hilarious moments.
• Living off toast while navigating the waves of poverty that almost every young and new artist seems to endure at some point, Daniel's early years as a freelancer were no stranger to the learning opportunities found in struggle.
• With a growing body of work, the inspirational highs and lows of discovering the next great image that has always fueled him can sometimes prove even more challenging.
• Recognizing that we've all been trained to seek entertainment in this culture of distraction, Daniel believes we all have the ability to tune into a frequency where we can see life as a source of entertainment, rather than as a means of validation or proof of our own value.
• Like anyone who has battled imposter syndrome, Daniel says he’s been scared enough times to know to trust the process.
• A master of metaphor, Daniel compares digital photography to a conversation with success, while film is one with failure, simply because each frame is a risk without any guiding screen or preview.
• According to Arnold, we've become thirstier for control and perfection than ever before, and as a result, it's imperfection that has become more gorgeous and human than ever.

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Notable Quotes: 

• "I'm the oldest of six kids, and I really do think that reveals itself as meaningful in new ways all the time. I think that the combination of the fact that, you know, I realized by the time I was like 11 or 12 that there just was not going to be enough attention to go around—like, I wasn't going to be the star, the role I was born into in the family—and so, you know, first of all, there was this sort of prompt and opening to just make my own world and entertain myself."
• "That's always been a big priority for me: to make evidence that, you know, things could be better than the rules of the world allow."
• "I felt like if I went to, you know, a desk job like that at Viacom, being forced to just crank it out every day would somehow unblock me from the horror of the blank page. Like if I automated creativity, it would cultivate some kind of fluency in me, which it never did, but it did give me plenty of time and stability to just let my mind wander. Um, and it took me all kinds of crazy places."
• "The value of these passing little kind of micro gem moments. I was always tuned in that way. Not necessarily in the language of photography, but just as a storyteller and a hoarder and a preserver of the preciousness and hilariousness of life."
• "If you trust yourself and you believe in what you're doing, and more or less believe that things will turn out okay, especially if it's just you, you know, I had nobody else to say, 'We only have toast today.'"
• "I give a disclaimer at the start of most jobs, or like pull a model aside if I'm lucky enough to have a model, and say, 'Look, I’ve got to tell you, I don't know how to do anything good on purpose.'"
• "Thinking about the story from the end instead of from today, like there's this container to fill, and I don't want to let anything dishearten or dissuade me, or make me insecure enough that I don't do my best to fill that with proof of what was going on in my head."
• “I think it's just, I don't know, maybe a matter of looking to your life for a source of entertainment rather than for something to validate you or prove your value, you know? Instead of looking for any kind of payback, just let go and enjoy the show."
• "I've been scared enough times that if I just trust the process and believe that, you know, I'm here because somebody thinks I know what I'm doing, I love to come out of something like that with the picture that I care about."
• "I think in a world that is more and more thirsty for control and for perfection, that imperfection becomes so gorgeous and human. And, um, spontaneity and improvisation, and that sort of automatic brain that makes us human. You can't, you can't beat that by feeding prompts into a supercomputer."