October 31, 2025
Lead Image© Daniel Arnold 2025. Courtesy of Loose Joints
New York City has fed the obsessive lenses of greats like Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Joel Meyerowitz, but it’s one of the city’s most brazen documenters, Bruce Gilden, who perhaps pinpoints what the street photographer is really searching for: “I’m photographing myself out there,” he once said. “It’s my take on the world.”
When it comes to modern New York, one of the best known photographers on the streets today is Daniel Arnold. A writer turned internet sensation, the Wisconsin-born artist shot to notoriety in the early 2010s with his wry shots of city life posted online, casting both the glamorous and the downtrodden in a sprawling continuum of humour, struggle and desire. Much has changed for Arnold over the last 15 years. Away from the pavement, he’s become an in-demand fixture in the fashion industry, lensing the Met Gala and making work for brands like Gucci, while filling gallery walls around the world with his images.
15You Are What You Do by Daniel Arnold
Through this period, he’s come to view his practice in a very different light, as evidenced by his second monograph, You Are What You Do, which arrives courtesy of Loose Joints. Interestingly, it spans the same decade as his punchy 2022 debut Pickpocket, which was charged with an energised kind of momentum and sleaze. Yet this new book reveals a different side to the photographer – one that’s more sombre, introspective, and closely aligned with how he views his work today.
Arnold appears on screen from his New York apartment, which he has just returned to after a funeral. The gravel-voiced artist answers each question with a considered depth, despite being visibly drained after the weekend he has had. “You don’t have to tell anybody that it’s been an insane decade of upheaval,” he says, when asked about the tonal shift in the book. “A lot changed in my way of working around Covid and the explosive moment around George Floyd’s death. It felt overwhelmingly despicable, off and wrong in that moment to use Instagram or to use photography as a means of self-promotion.”
At this time, Arnold’s relationship to social media also began to sour, and now he shares his work online far less frequently. “Instagram was incredibly world shifting,” he says. “I probably wouldn’t be speaking to you without it. But once it had worked for me, I immediately started pushing it away. To be very candid, I have enough followers that it would be a crazy act of self-mutilation to kill it. God knows someday I might need to press a button and talk to 400,000 people. But I think that every day that has passed, I get a little bit less comfortable with it.”
© Daniel Arnold 2025. Courtesy of Loose Joints
“We are not doing crazy, uncanny, city surrealism. This is a different side of me … It reveals a more sentimental, beauty minded, grieving point of view” – Daniel Arnold
Simmering in the intense shifting states of America and losses in his personal life, Arnold met with Loose Joints founders Sarah Chaplin Espenon and Lewis Chaplin, handing over a vast edit of his work to the Marseille-based publishers. “When I first started talking to them, I made it clear that things had changed,” he explains. “I wasn’t interested in doing ‘funny Daniel’. We are not doing crazy, uncanny, city surrealism. This is a different side of me through the same period of time. It reveals a more sentimental, beauty minded, grieving point of view, I think.”
Sequenced without any text or dates, the resulting book drifts through a spectral mix of beauty, humour and unease. There are smile-rousing scenes – a child nestled in his father’s lap, a couple kissing in a hydrant spray of water, a woman inhaling a bunch of flowers – alongside images that capture a more disquieting mood, such as a sea of phones raised toward something unseen and a toddler clutching a sign asking, “Does life have a purpose?”. Interspersed are Arnold’s brushes with fame, from Kim Kardashian at the Met Gala to the late Angus Cloud lighting a cigarette on the street. The result is a portrait of New York that is unmistakably the artist’s own, yet tempered by a sense of distance, yearning, and reflection brought about by the passage of time.
Some of the most affecting images are those that balance several feelings at once, such as a strange mix of tenderness and danger in one shot of a smiling dad and his young son peering through the viewfinder of a gun. “I’ve shown that picture in public and people are always outraged,” he says. “The truth of that picture is, we’re on vacation and my incredibly fun, great father of a brother is holding a BB gun and he’s playing with his kids. There’s no danger. There’s no violence. But represented in that image is a truth that in every carefree, beautiful moment, there is potential for subversion and horror.”
© Daniel Arnold 2025. Courtesy of Loose Joints
It’s the slipperiness of perception, and the knife-edge of a moment, that Arnold is forever interested in playing with. “That image is a useful keyhole into the larger game that I’m constantly playing,” he continues. “On any given day, there’s an endless opportunity to take things out of context. You just cut a rectangle out of the world and paste your own version into it.” It’s the reason why none of the images in the book are dated or titled. “The experience of making the work is giving myself over to the randomness of what passes in front of me,” he says. “You get the work the same way that I got it, like the surprise around every corner.”
While Arnold shoots no less prolifically than when he quit his job as a writer 13 years ago – he still takes thousands of images a month – this new book underscores how he now moves through the city, capturing New York’s sprawl of life in a way that’s no longer “hungry and aggressive” but more akin to an endless kind of meditation. “My job is to walk around alone and think,” he says. “The camera goes everywhere that I go, and the work never ends. There isn’t really any punctuation. But the work is slower, it’s quieter, it’s subtler now. I think that’s the main thing: it’s like a conversation between me and myself.”
You Are What You Do by Daniel Arnold is published by Loose Joints and is out now.