His photos are striking and real. But is Chris Arnade a journalist? – Columbia Journalism Review

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His photos are striking and real. But is Chris Arnade a journalist?

I met Chris Arnade at the McDonald’s near the 6 train, under the bridge that breaks Hunt’s Point off from the rest of the Bronx. Arnade calls it the most dysfunctional McDonald’s in the United States, and he would know. His latest photo essay demonstra

via Columbia Journalism Review: http://www.cjr.org/the_feature/chris_arnade_journalism_photography_photojournalism.php

Arnade is a former Wall Street banker—wealthy, confident, middle-aged, white—who lives upstate. These days, his full-time, poorly-paid gig is driving his light-blue minivan around the country to photograph its ugliest, poorest places. It started as a hobby about five years ago, while he was still at the foreign exchange desk at Citigroup. He would come up to the Bronx on evenings and weekends with a Nikon D700 and a fearless, even brusque curiosity to discover how the other half lived. He spent several years documenting the lives of addicts and sex workers in Hunt’s Point, posting prolifically to Flickr in a collection called Faces of Addiction.