Daniel Arnold isn’t all that interested in making a “great” photograph. He’s more concerned with the itches—the urges and impulses that carry over the course of a career. In his 10 and some years of shooting, things have started to emerge as sustaining themes and subjects, but he’s mostly content with satiating immediate curiosities. Maybe, down the line, he’ll have some heady statement about art and life to preach at us, but for the time being, he’s fulfilled by feeding his seemingly endless creative appetite. “If you do it long enough, and in a committed enough way, you can make this sort of involuntary document of what humanity looks like. You find, through that relentless tinkering, something that is proof of the self,” he muses. “I don’t know that that’s valuable art in the commercial sense of the word. But I don’t care. I just think it’s an interesting thing to do with my time.”

On June 28, the photographer will celebrate the publication of a zine for New York Life Gallery. Like Arnold’s practice, it was built from instinct. After a series of unfulfilled impositions of a thematic or narrative structure (which manifested in mostly-empty Dropbox folders), he let go of any want for a firm form to work within. He explains, “By relieving myself of the potential seriousness of the exercise, it felt more like a word game.” The images, then, were chosen with emotive intuition, selected for their qualities of playfulness and energy—“with very liberal exceptions.” It really is a glimpse into Arnold’s New York, where poetry is found in that which is typically considered pedestrian, and everyone is their own God.

Ahead of his self-titled zine’s release, Arnold joins Document to ruminate on the philosophies of his practice and dissect the function of documentary.

Megan Hullander: I think it’s easy to see photographers with as prolific of an output as yours and assume that every image you take must be perfect and worth sharing—just because of the sheer volume of your work. But I wonder how much winds up on the cutting room floor.

Daniel Arnold: I think that frequency is much less significant of a contributor than duration. Obviously, I get pickier and pickier. And over the 10 or 12 years I’ve been doing this, there’s been such an explosion of other voices who are working in the same language as me. So, it gets harder and harder to be satisfied with my output—and I mean that in a positive way. Although I do plenty of hand-wringing and suffering, I do feel gratitude for the fact that there’s this accelerated evolution that I’m forced into if I want to stay interested in myself.

My first inclination when I get a roll back is that I want to keep most of it. There’s even something interesting in the utter failures—like, a deeply, deeply failed fuck-up photo becomes interesting and worth keeping. The middle ground of ‘just boring’ gets tossed. Anything that has some sort of vibration for me goes in a folder, and then that folder gets thrown on a pile of other folders. And I look back and look back and look back and look back, and make an edit for every month, and an edit for every year, and then I go back over the edits of the years.

I was just [at] the Lee Friedlander show in Chelsea. My girlfriend pointed out that there were these two pictures that were very similar: There’s this classic nude of his wife, where his shadow is over her body, sort of dismembered, and next to that is this very complementary picture of their shadows together in a doorway. And she noticed that those pictures were taken 30, 35 years apart. Cutting or no cutting, prolific or not, that is inspiring to me. You’re still taking a picture of shadows on the ground 35 years later, you’re still indulging that itch. I mean, it’s obviously exciting to get a photo where you’re, like, Oh my God, this is a great photo. But if that sort of sprint mentality was what I was working from, I don’t think I’d still be going. It’s the itch.

Megan: Do you think revisiting your work so frequently keeps you in tune with those impulses?

Daniel: I see this more hungry, voracious, energetic, flash-all-day-on-the-street maniac. It’s a very different mentality now. It’s been probably 12 or 13 years of super-focused work since I quit my job and really threw myself into it. And, you know, the 10 years from 33 to 43, there’s a physical [difference], for sure. I see the energy of the early work and think that maybe it’s a shame to have let go of some of that hunger.

At the same time, anytime I try to do anything backward looking, like organizing a book or a show, it’s been such an education. Maybe I had some sort of innate sense of composition from looking at pictures my whole life, but there was something very visceral back then—I didn’t know how to use a camera. I was years into doing fairly high-profile work before I even began to learn how to use a camera. It feels so daunting to attempt to make any kind of total statement when it really still feels like I’m learning how to do whatever it is that I’m doing. The language is still in progress, so shouldn’t I wait to write a sentence until I can really speak it?

“I think that the more I can do work without thinking, the more it feels like mine.”

Megan: Are you ever afraid that technicality will inhibit you, especially with the impulse-driven nature of your practice?

Daniel: I recognize that as an enemy. I’m not the first to say it, but I try to stay a beginner as much as I can. And, obviously, there’s the technical stuff that I’m grateful for: I can use the camera more efficiently, I don’t have to keep the flash on to have things in focus. But I am not a technical photographer. I’ll be in total control, getting paid to conduct a photo shoot, and on-set I’ll still catch myself shooting down by my belly. So much of it is just putting myself in uncomfortable situations and seeing what happens, and trying to articulate the value of that always gets muddy. But I think that the more I can do work without thinking, the more it feels like mine.

Megan: Something that feels consistent in your work—over the course of your career and across the commercial and personal—is the difficulty to place it in time, which I think comes from the relationship with your subjects and your camera. There’s an unawareness of it, or an unselfconsciousness of it, that feels subversive of contemporary relationships people have with being photographed.

Daniel: I’m just not that interested in a picture of somebody having their picture taken. That was a discovery that probably evolved out of fear. You can be afraid, but you can’t be shy if you’re working during the day on the street with a flash. I don’t do that anymore, but I do think that, in that process, the stuff that felt more like mine was ‘life uninterrupted,’ the world that doesn’t acknowledge me. Which, I guess, now that I say that out loud, is maybe an expression of my experience of the world, or my desired experience of the world—to get to step outside of it and act as a kind of ghost. I see other people’s work that’s more confrontational and more invasive, and sometimes I think, Should I be taking pictures like that? But I try not to listen to that kind of voice.

Megan: I think something that we’ve been culturally reckoning with a lot lately is what documentary means. With photography, you look at someone like Bruce Gilden, who has that more confrontational approach, and then you have the Jim Goldbergs, who are more interested in the authorship of the subject. And there’s a subjectivity in all of it. How do you think that you and your perspective permeate into the images?

Daniel: I think people think of me on the Gilden end of that spectrum, and I don’t think that’s accurate. I relate more to a traffic surveillance camera than either of those guys. Nothing against those guys, I love them—and I don’t know if this is to my credit or to my discredit, and I guess I don’t really care—but I’m not crafting an aesthetic or a narrative or an artistic statement. It genuinely feels like I have discovered this bottomless well of appetite and interest. The energy is dwindling a little bit, but I still am satisfied to go and just see what happens every day, letting this weird impulse just run its course. I feel satisfied to find out what happened later. Right now, I still feel like I’m collecting the parts.

And there’s a lot of really ambitious stuff happening out there. I think that has functioned in a big—and sometimes unpleasant—way as a mirror for me. As a reaction to that, I have really pared down the public-facing part of my work. I don’t mean this in any remotely holier than thou way. I wonder constantly if I’m just an idiot who’s throwing everything away. I’ve just gotten really fixated on trying to maintain a purity and humility, and not ask much of the work. I’d rather learn from my experience than I would from seeing what is successful for the people around me in the marketplace.

“I’m just not that interested in a picture of somebody having their picture taken.”

Megan: I think that marketplace is very much defined right now by social media, especially for visual artists. It’s maybe easier to villainize its role and point to the ways it has corrupted art forms, and corrupted our senses of self. But are there any ways you think social media has served your perspective on your process beyond expanding your audience?

Daniel: I worked as a writer for 10 years. I thought that was what I was. Instagram, in its unholy way, dangled the juiciest carrot in front of me. It got me over a really significant hump, that, You’re really gonna be this indulgent? It shut that voice out.

And I think it’s a really harmless source of the audacity to ask, Why not me? Why not take this to some obscene, self-destructive level? Why not commit my life to something that is nontraditional and potentially destructive and really irresponsible? It totally decentralized creativity, and knocked down all these false hierarchies and gate-kept admission standards. All I ever did was work hard. It made this new open market for anybody who had the audacity to push it. It’s left us in a kind of impossible place now where it’s so oversaturated, where it’s really hard to distinguish even your own voice in the mix. And so I pulled hard away from it, but I think that, at least in an introductory way, it did a lot of good.

Megan: Do you feel more of a sense of responsibility to your audience or your subject?

Daniel: Definitely my subjects. I feel like I don’t even know my audience. I maybe would have thought totally differently about this a few years ago, but—without any of the negative connotations of the word—I feel pretty alienated from an audience. Like, there’s this story of the guy, Daniel Arnold, that has advanced beyond my control. I’m not in charge of that story anymore. I go out and represent that guy, and when someone gets the wrong idea, I would love the opportunity to correct them. But it’s really gone inward. I think that the responsibility is equally to the subject, and to myself.

Megan: It seems like, broadly, your work is often interpreted as New York itself being that subject. Is that true for you, or do you see it more as a conduit for whatever it is you may be contending with?

Daniel: New York is incidental. I mean, New York is the best incidental you could ask for. But I’m happy to do the same thing no matter where I am. I do it in Milwaukee, when I see my family. I’ve done it all over the world. New York just happens to be a good source of energy. There’s such a density of people that you always have a lot to work with. It’s like the video game version, the simulator training module of whatever you want to do. And it gives you access to this sort of leveled human experience, that maybe anybody outside of here would roll their eyes at, as living in a fantasy world. As much as this is a fantasy-driven place, day-to-day reality is fantasy-free. No matter how well you’re doing, or how badly you’re doing, you still got to walk through shit, you still gotta go gotta suffer every day. No matter how clever you are, there are 10,000 other people who are either just as clever, doing the same thing as you, or copying your thing and pretending they didn’t, or you’re copying their thing and pretending you’re not. There’s no room to really be special. New York is just this great education in what it is to be a person, dealing with being alive.

“I think part of that New York education is looking at the city and seeing that, in a way, every person is God of their world, inventing the whole story of the universe every day.”

Megan: I mean, I think you have to have some small semblance of feeling special for any creative pursuit though, don’t you?

Daniel: I don’t think I feel pushed to make anything special. I think part of that New York education is looking at the city and seeing that, in a way, every person is God of their world, inventing the whole story of the universe every day. And maybe there’s overlap in whatever is being marketed to them, but, on some level, everybody is inventing reality every day, nonstop. And there’s no knowing anybody else’s. So, whatever little quirk or intricacy of my perspective, wherever that came from in the 43 years of whatever pinball shit has coincidentally happened to me, that’s just the proof of an indulged instinct. If you do it long enough, and in a committed enough way, you can make this sort of involuntary document of what humanity looks like. You find, through that relentless tinkering, something that is proof of the self. I don’t know that that’s valuable art in the commercial sense of the word. But I don’t care. I just think it’s an interesting thing to do with my time. What it could boil down to is, I’m just scared of death. And I’m trying not to be implicated in the horror of existence. But I’m not hurting anybody, am I?