On the Prowl With Instagram's Ultimate Street Photographer

Maciek Jasik It's bright but cold and the yellow cabs and skyscrapers are on some Big Apple snow-globe shit—the whole thing looks like a Hollywood back lot. Fifty-third and Fifth Avenue is an aggressively New York corner and one I usually avoid for reasons of: It's gross. At 11 am on a Friday the workers […]

Maciek Jasik

It's bright but cold and the yellow cabs and skyscrapers are on some Big Apple snow-globe shit—the whole thing looks like a Hollywood back lot. Fifty-third and Fifth Avenue is an aggressively New York corner and one I usually avoid for reasons of: It's gross. At 11 am on a Friday the workers are tucked away in glass towers, so the block is a stockyard of tourists dead set on funning themselves past enjoyment. I'm stooping on the slab steps of Saint Thomas Church, the flouncy late Gothic Revival limestone stretching tall and thin, heavenward, like the rest of the Midtown skyline. It's a pretty spot—classy, even (if your only other point of comparison is Times Square)—but it's a brain-bleeder when you have to muck in it with the masses.

Today is more hectic than normal because of spring break. You've got the Euros waiting outside Abercrombie & Fitch like it's a cultural landmark. And you can ID the British chicks from a mile away because they gleam with a morning show's worth of self-tanner. You have to watch out for the 6-year-olds who are short, quick, and sturdy, because they'll hobble you with their American Girl shopping bags. I'm downwind from the cologne-thickened air at Hollister, and at one point I have to get up because I'm in some teenager's shot. His camera costs $3,000.

I'm waiting for Daniel Arnold, a New York street photographer who would never use a Canon Mark III to shoot the side door of an Episcopalian church. Nor would he ever boost a stranger from the frame. Arnold, 34, uses the camera on his iPhone and sees a gormless-looking random perched on a stair as a win, to be celebrated in a couple of dashed-off creep shots. Arnold has been compared to a contemporary Robert Frank (or Frank's mentor, Walker Evans) for his gimlet-eyed view of the city and its people, but his slavish dedication to daily shooting could be compared to that of the blue-smocked street photographer Bill Cunningham. He's a full-time freelancer—pocketing a day rate for gigs—but it was a last-minute print sale that once paid the rent. Last March, on his birthday, he sold prints off his feed for $150 a pop and made $15,000. Forbes wrote about it. According to Gawker, Arnold is Instagram's best photographer. These statements in concert should disqualify my ever enjoying his work, but I can't help it. Daniel Arnold's New York makes me love mine.

As much as mornings like these cause me to despise the city—and as stupid as it is to complain about other people pouring money into your town—this is where Daniel Arnold does his best work. He excels deep in the shit with the vacationers and outer-borough natives who serve the matrix. And for every complaint I've flung at our congested streets or cramped, broken subway, he's captured the likeness of Alice Cooper in a woman's profile or snapped a languid young couple reading each other's palms. These photos slay me.

Arnold's New York is NY1 New York. It's the city on the local news. It's everyone you've seen on the street and never thought twice about.

“Dude, you missed it. You missed the craziest thing.” Arnold walks toward me at a clip, and it takes me a moment to register his as a face I recognize. We've hung out exactly once prior but have mutual friends, and I began following his work—then mostly shots of subway passengers and train platforms—in early 2012. Commutes in the winter are rough, and there was comfort in the recognition that everyone in his photos looked as miserable as I felt. “No one wants to acknowledge it's happening,” Arnold told me earlier, referring to wan, subterranean New Yorkers on their way to work. “They go to sleep until they get off.” He started taking photos, and this mutually agreed-upon disconnect allowed him to become more and more audacious, narrowing the distance between him and his quarry. The electric fence is rarely activated no matter how insanely close he comes to his subjects. Today, though, he got busted. “I just got yelled at in the subway in front of a hundred people,” he says.

Arnold has about 60,000 followers on Instagram. He has lived in Brooklyn for 12 years (since before it was cool) and before that, he lived in Milwaukee. He has a ruddy beard, dark wavy hair, and Semitic features with a corn-fed comportment. His jeans are Levi's, his jacket vintage, and his well-worn boots are American-made. He's not unhandsome but looks like someone everyone went to school with. In New York, his face makes good cover. Plus, he uses a stealth shortcut on his iPhone where the top volume button acts as a shutter, making him even tougher to catch in the act.

All the photos he posts are shot with either his old iPhone 5, which has a cracked screen, or his new 5S that routinely blurs every third take. Arnold hates the 5S camera and holds a grudge for every picture it has ruined. Today, though, it's the subway vigilante that's harshing his mellow. “I got these girls,” he tells me. “They were amazing. Their heads were covered in this beautiful purple and they were shooting selfies and I caught their reflections. This guy's checking me out and starts screaming, ‘You think they like that?’”

Arnold calls himself “paparazzi for strangers,” but he's also a keen casting agent and a dynamite run-and-gun director of photography. His best shots are movie stills—lit and blocked entirely by happenstance. “Such a scene,” he says, visibly shaken. (The women in their matching purple hijabs come out beautifully, by the way.)

For those who care about this sort of thing: Arnold used the VSCO Cam app until he decided it was too stylized. He now just uses Whitagram to fiddle with the aspect ratio and throw on a border. He's not big on filters—he finds them disingenuous and overprocessed. On any given day, he spends four to eight hours (sometimes 12) just walking around taking pictures wherever he is. The New York subway becomes a Los Angeles bus whenever he finds himself out West. The clothes get more abbreviated for the hotter climate while the facial expressions remain uncannily the same.

Today he has agreed to let me tag along, and I dress inconspicuously, like a yoga mom, in black leggings, a dun-colored parka, and Nike sneakers. We're taking his regular route—starting at 53rd and Fifth, moving to the Diamond District on 47th between Fifth and Sixth, then over to Times Square, on to Central Park, and ending at the Met. I stay with him for more than seven hours during which time we stop to pee once and don't eat a thing. The forward momentum is steady and insistent. “I've fallen into an obsession,” he says. “My room is horrifying—I don't stop to do the administrative stuff—I have this awful, damning, anxiety-inducing pile of pictures. But I just keep going and going.” Arnold is not looking for a specific shot, not working toward a conscious artistic goal. He's obsessively scratching an itch. He never checks his work as he shoots; he waits until he gets home to evaluate the bounty. He's like a pickpocket more intent on pulling off the grab, again and again, than on counting the loot.

Arnold calls himself "paparazzi for strangers."

“Look at that,” he says, lighting up. “They're pushed together dick to dick.” We're standing at the light to cross Fifth Avenue and I swivel my head. A pale, gangly man with stringy white hair carries two stark-white mannequins down the street. He's hugging the men who are hugging each other and the composition is elegant, absurd, and excellent. Arnold sighs. “That's so great.”

We head south. I begin in lockstep with him, but our conversation and gaits jag as he often peels off to chase a mark. Arnold—a blur in his Canadian tux and navy sweater—is supereasy to lose in a crowd, and when I tell him, he says it's because most people wear blue. I look up; he's right.

By noon we're at Rockefeller Center, and I watch Arnold practically climb into sightseeing family huddles, rarely tickling the collective instinct that something's amiss. It really is like they're ignoring him, and it's the oddest thing to behold. “The iPhone is a great tool,” he says, sliding the slim rectangle inches away from the little kid with a grown man's face who's sitting with his parents, staring intently at his lap. “It can get you into the tiniest places.” The kid's dad—whose nose is buried in his phone—looks like he could throw a punch. I ask Arnold if he's ever been physically attacked. He hasn't. “There are people I don't fuck with,” he says. “I make a quick assessment, but once in a while I'll ask permission, and invariably it's a bad photo.” It's true that his subjects don't often know they're being watched, but he gets close enough that the myopia is astounding. Observing him at work is like accompanying someone on a shoplifting spree where all the security guards have been drugged.

As we crisscross Midtown, we talk about our careers, philosophies, mutual friends, and it occurs to me that he's using me as a decoy. It's that “quick, let's make out” ploy that rom-com movie spies use in a pinch. Except way more low-key. Even when subjects notice he's photographing them, it takes a beat, so when Arnold says “Have a nice day” or “Thank you,” they nod or say “You're welcome” by rote. Sometimes I don't avert my eyes fast enough and have to combat the reflex to apologize. It feels like performance art more than anything else, and he's aware of how unorthodox his work is even in the broad landscape of contemporary photography. “Photos in my phone didn't feel like real photos for a long time,” he says. “But Instagram flipped a switch. There was suddenly a place for a whole range of photos. Very quickly, serious people were taking them seriously.”

Arnold was a writer before he was a photographer, working for The Fader and blogging back when Blogspot was a thing. By the summer of 2012 he had about 1,500 followers on Instagram, including respected photographers and early-adopter art directors. In June he posted a shot of topless sunbathers at the beach at Fort Tilden. It evoked a dreamy, hyper-saturated, almost 1960s surfer vibe and garnered so many likes that Arnold's phone died. When he juiced up, he'd been kicked off Instagram for indecency: The service has a nipple ban. “It was devastating,” he says. “I felt like I was onto something, and then it was irretrievably gone.” Instagram banned his handle, but his friends' #freedanielarnold Instagram and Twitter campaign drew attention to his work. He created a new account under a different handle (@arnold_daniel), and he has since held solo shows, commandeered the New Yorker Instagram feed, and shot for Vogue. Instagram now mentions him as a suggested follow.

Shortly after 1 pm, we hit Times Square, barreling into a throng gawping at the M&M's store. I recoil. “I hated Times Square for so long,” he says as we thread through the fracas of rival Hello Kittys, bootleg Naked Cowboys, and a zillion central- business-district employees scrambling for lunch. “Now I walk into it and have this feeling—this totally absurd feeling of ‘This is mine.’” It's true, 42nd is rife with Daniel Arnold pictures waiting to happen. An enormous woman wearing a cat suit the exact color of her skin and hair. An older Puerto Rican man wearing all-black-and-red Chicago Bulls-logo'd clothing. It's unsurprising that Ash Wednesday is Arnold's favorite holiday of the year. There's nothing like a charcoal cross on a banker's forehead in the middle of Times Square to evoke end times at the circus.

This may smack of hoi polloi bingo, like Arnold's appeal is rooted in hipster-imperialist hauteur. He's been criticized for posting images of the disfigured or unequivocally not-pretty. But he rarely comments on his own photos or leaves a caption, so his intent remains ambiguous. “The photo speaks for itself,” he says. “I'm very happy to be around anybody who's engaged in their moment. Shooting gives me new affection for all people.” To me, his photo selection seems egalitarian somehow. Like everyone's a character actor and anyone has the potential to be a muse. And for Arnold, it's a form of therapy. “There was a period where I was unmanageably dark,” he says. “Tuning out of my head and into the world pulls me out of that pit.”

There's a genuine pleasure in the process and a bracing lack of irony in the delivery. In Central Park, at the Greywacke Arch, there's a man in a fedora playing “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” on saxophone. It's a canned '80s movie scene, yet the light is insane and I buy into it completely. “This is not a bad way to spend a day,” Arnold says. We make a beeline for the bronzed Alice in Wonderland statue because I haven't seen it in years. I take a photo. He does not.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there's a sprawling family of freckled redheads in matching blue-and-white gingham shirts. It's the sour-faced middle child, defiantly wearing a fleece to disguise the allegiance that his ginger hair betrays, who glares at Arnold like a cat at a ghost. He moves in to hide his three sisters, ruining the intended Matryoshka effect. It's often the ignored kid in the family who clocks Arnold first.

There's another woman, a reed-thin blonde with a patrician nose wearing an unseasonable full-length sable and a fascinator—that British practice of attaching a feathered brooch to your head. She senses a bogey on her tail and makes haste. Then there's the goth teen with dark glittering eyes who has the opposite of “resting bitch face.” Her scowl is a mask, and her unposed face bathed in the light of the Roman Sculpture Court is disarmingly sweet. After seven hours of watching people as Daniel Arnold does, you see the posed photo for how empty and artless it is—the same arranged duck face or the unnatural tilt of the head that lengthens the neck. The unposed face is a sight for sore eyes. “People are so on guard and used to being photographed,” he says. “Everybody sets out to look a certain way and it never goes quite how they expect. It's catching those moments in between that makes for an interesting picture.”

Trailing Daniel Arnold, walking along the Park Avenue medians, is a grand time. It never occurred to me in 12 years of living in New York City that you could walk there in the middle of the road. And when we take the F train down to West Fourth and he teaches me how to open the latched metal doors and ride in between cars, I relish the tiny rebellion. Granted, we have to walk three cars before he sees someone he likes, but when Daniel Arnold finally shoots, he looks happy.