Bill Arnold

Photographing is a little like cross-country running. You need only the minimum equipment to be out in the world. Once out, you’re invisible. “Just a runner.” Or “only a tourist.” Untethered, wide-awake, and moving. Running is about listening—to the sound of your shoes, your heart, your lungs. You’re it. Photographing is about searching. Looking for something you recognize only when you push the button. It’s you and everything else. At the end of a run, you realize your strength. When you get back to the studio, you realize how lucky you are. We need to move, but we also need something else.

Biography

Born in Brooklyn, New York, 1941. Lives in Florence, Massachusetts.

Bill Arnold trained at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he studied with Jerry Burchard and John Collier, but he also credits Henri Cartier-Bresson, Vincent van Gogh, Gertrude Stein, and Langston Hughes as major forces in his aesthetic development. In addition to teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute, Arnold has taught at Amherst College, Hampshire College, and Pratt Institute.

In 1970, he invented what he calls “a darkroom in a machine,” the Itek printer, which uses the technology of microfilm reader/printers to instantly develop and print 18 x 24 inch black-and-white images. Using the Itek printer, Arnold organized two landmark exhibitions of works on city buses; forty-four Boston buses showed Arnold’s prints in 1973, and the project was enlarged to display prints by multiple artists on 400 buses in New York City.