In 1975, at age 25, Arnold Jarmak moved to Chelsea, Massachusetts where he set about photographing the city and its people. He captured reality and caught the imagination of the city everyday with his front page photographs for the daily newspaper, the Chelsea Record. Without affect, without a meaningful interest in personal enrichment, he exposed 20,000 images in Chelsea between 1975 and 1988. Forty years later his images inspire what Proust referred to as Remembrance of Things Past. The small, struggling, poverty stricken, corrupt American city he came to as a young man during the 1970’s is a place and an era irretrievably gone – except for his compelling images. With the eye and the young man’s fervor of a Eugene Atget, Jarmak records life in all its vagueries and forms in this unique small city one mile from downtown Boston. His unvarnished photographs of Chelsea’s residents reveals of Jarmak what Pablo Picasso said was the effort to wash the dust of daily life off our souls. After all, who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror or the painter?
Jarmak’s photography does not encroach upon the domain of a just appreciation for what used to be. He expressed daily with his photography what Baudelaire described as designating the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience.
Jarmak has never considered himself an artist. He is at ease being just another thoughtful and creative man carrying a camera and being unafraid to record life with it. His photographs dazzle like the stars, as Victor Hugo liked to say.
This exhibition is a testament to the idea expressed by Hippocrates that the will to work must dominate, for art is long and time is brief.
Jarmak’s images capture lost Chelsea. The message his photographs convey reverberates inside us – those of us concerned with what came before.
Joshua Resnek
