Artist : William Arnold (b. 1983)
Title : Living Spaces : Luke’s Home Office, December 18th to January 3rd / William’s Room, February 17th to 24th / Silje’s Bedroom, June 6th to 21st (Continuous exposure from paper negative)
Medium : archival inkjet print on hahnemuhle photorag 308gsm
Size : 43 x 56 cm each


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Living Places: ‘The pleasures of life do not fill time but leave it empty. The human mind however, feels detestation and discomfort in the presence of empty time. Present time can admittedly seem to us to be full, but in our own memory it nevertheless appears to empty, for when time is full of diversions and the like, it only feels full when it is contemporaneous - in the memory it is empty. If one has not done anything in one’s life but simply waste one’s time, and then looks back at one’s life, one will be unable to understand how it could come to an end so swiftly.’ - Emmanual Kant

Through use of an adapted paper negative process, ‘Living Places’ takes a wry look at the present era of ubiquitous surveillance and social networking by literally recording everything that has happened within the participant’s living space for periods of a week or more in a single photographic frame. Subjects were sought and chosen through an open-call online, collaborating in the installation of the camera in their chosen personal space, which was then left, shutter open over an extended timeframe. The resulting images give cause to reflect on the need to record our lives in comprehensive detail and the corresponding trend of making this record of banal, yet often highly personal information available for wider consumption. These photographs seek, in abstracted form to document and to an extent subvert this confessional trend, in which the public and private are increasingly entangled; the intimate commonplace.

William Arnold is an experimental, conceptual and documentary photographer, interested in the layers of human and natural history that comprise the making of the landscape, and the role played by the photograph in documenting time and change—the subjective and objective politics of places and their histories. His first monograph Suburban Herbarium was published by Uniformbooks (2020) with his work showcased in various publications and periodicals including: The Guardian, New Scientist, De Standaard, Source and Resurgence & Ecologist Magazine. He lives and works in West Cornwall, UK.


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