The Great Midwesterner

Tom Arndt was a self-described "sodbuster from Minnesota" when he first visited New York City in 1971. But the world of contemporary photography was small then, and Arndt had soon met director John Szarkowski and curator Peter Bunnell at the Museum of Modern Art's photography department, Harold Jones at Light Gallery, and art dealer Ivan Karp, who gave him a show at his O.K. Harris Gallery.

"It was like I was being guided," says Arndt of his entrée into the world of 20th century American fine-art photography.

The first photographs Arndt showed in New York were highly detailed new realist images that, with their complex compositions of reflections in chrome and glass, looked something like black-and-white versions of Richard Estes' urban streetscape paintings. This summer, after not having shown in Manhattan for 17 years, Arndt, who is currently residing in Chicago, returned to New York with an exhibition at Howard Greenberg Gallery. The show featured not his new work or work he gathered over two decades crisscrossing America, but vintage 1970s black-and-white images from Arndt's on-going documentation of his native Minnesota.

The selection Howard Greenberg made emphasized the quiet side of Arndt with images of emptiness and isolation—empty booths in a diner, a pool table in a bar, the shop windows of a surplus store, an appliance dealer, a beauty salon. The Minnesotans in the pictures often seemed somehow trapped—a popcorn vendor in her trailer, a carnival worker in her ring toss booth, a retired couple enmeshed in leafy shadows in front of their mobile home, an old man's reflection caught in the cigarette machine of a White Castle restaurant.

Tom Arndt is a folk poet with a camera. Rather than seeking out the sensational, freakish or bizarre, his best work deals with the ordinary, consistent with his professional credo —"I'm a common man and I photograph common people."

Arndt, now 62, was born in Minneapolis in 1944. He began his studies at Minnesota College of Art and Design (BFA 1968) in painting and drawing but soon discovered his passion for the descriptive powers of the camera. His early photographs, however, were more conceptual than documentary. When he became the first photographer to win the Minnesota art school's coveted Ethel Morrison Van Derlip Award, for instance, Arndt used the stipend to recreate the illusion of space of Cézanne paintings in 4-foot square photographs.

It was as a graduate student in photography at the University of Minnesota (1969-71) that Arndt began working in the mainstream documentary tradition that has defined his photography ever since. He attributes seeing the light of documentary photography to his university studies with Jerome Liebling and Elaine Mayes.

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