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
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.
Aside from a few notorious individuals—Henry Ford, perhaps, or Bernie Madoff—few people get to experience life at society’s top and bottom. Chris Arnade is an exception. Two years…
Chris Arnade is an exception. Two years ago, Arnade quit his job as a Wall Street trader to focus on a burgeoning hobby, photographing addicts and prostitutes in the Bronx neighborhood of Hunts Point
Almost two years ago I walked into the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx with my camera. I came because I was told not to go, that it was the poorest neighborhood in all of New York and one of the most violent in all of the United States. I was immediately drawn in by a humanity that transcended the headlines.
