Until October 31, Les Douches gallery features the work of American photgrapher Tom Ardnt. Born in Minneapolis, Tom Arndt’s photography focuses on his native Minnesota. Belonging to the grand, classic tradition of American documentary photography, Tom Arndt’s body of work offers us a sensitive, empathetic portrayal: a family album of the people who live in his state including their coffee shops and soda fountains, their streets, their shop windows, their parks, the popular state fairs. Pessimism and pity are out of place here. As Arndt’s friend and well known writer Garrison Keillor points out, Tom Arndt photographs the DNA of Minnesotan culture– the poor and the left out. Tom Arndt belongs to the silver print processing tradition; his printing is exceptionally beautiful. He spends at least several hours daily in the darkroom; he really loves the paper print. His photographs are part of numerous American museum collections.
As Toby Kamps, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Houston describes : “There is something more gentle and less brittle about Arndt’s work than that of these predecessors and many of the genre’s greats. He is less concerned with capturing Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” of compositional and symbolic perfection than stretching time a tiny bit to suggest its flow. Whether he’s depicting a conversation, a trip or even the act of waiting around, you feel Arndt’s appreciation for the rare psychic state of absorption. Catching the quotidian reveries that occur in taverns, on busses, or on front steps is one of the Arndt’s specialties. His compositions are often casual, as if the photographer were part of the scene rather than a razor-eyed, detached observer. While Arndt makes many pictures that catch his subjects unaware, he just as often lets us see that his subjects see themselves being seen. ”
