Minnesota

A stalwart Midwestern matron posing with her lawn mower on a tidy sidewalk. A gathering of animated adolescent girls glimpsed through the glare of a downtown candy shop's windows. A pensive man caught in a cigarette machine's mirror as he sits in a ray of sun at a diner counter. These are scenes any of us might encounter at any instant of our lives. While we might apprehend the beauty or poignancy of these fleeting moments, it takes extraordinary skill and reflexes to use a camera to transmute them into art. Minneapolis photographer Tom Arndt, author of these and thousands more frank, heartbreakingly real black-and-white images, is among a select few masters of street photography with the eye, instincts, and technical know-how to spin poetry from everyday sights.

Since the early 1970s, Arndt has dedicated himself to searching for telling images of people and the times and places they inhabit. Using the genre?s classic tools, Kodak Tri-X film and a fast, unobtrusive Leica,he has roamed the streets of big cities and small towns in the United States, Europe, and Latin America in search of those elusive and evanescent instances where stories and pictures align. His work connects to an august tradition of humanist street photography?images concerned with life's universal themes. It extends the innovations of the genre?s greats, past and present: Henri Cartier-Bresson?s intricate instantaneity; Garry Winogrand?s offhand timing and humor; Robert Frank?s unvarnished take on the American scene. Yet Arndt?s sensibility is wholly his own.

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 Arndt?s specialties. His compositions are often casual, as if the photographer were part of the scene rather than a razor-eyed, detached observer. Most strikingly, though, his humanism has a different tenor than that of most street photographers who work candidly or without directly engaging their subjects. While Arndt makes many pictures that catch his subjects unaware, he just as often lets us see that his subjects see themselves being seen.

Arndt is never dispassionate. He has committed himself to depicting his fellow humans with care. ?I?m interested in what it means to be alive. My subjects are people trying to get through today, and I?m with ?em,? he says. ?I want to make sure the people I photograph are fairly portrayed and in a respectful way.?Poverty, loneliness, and the slog of it all are regular themes in his work, but the cynical "gotcha" edge that animates many street photographs is never present. As demonstrated by his images of spectators bunched together on bleachers at a small-town tractor pull in 2013, a man peering at a menu posted in a restaurant window in 1982, and an empty phone booth in a bar in St. Paul taken in 1971, the desire for connection is always a subtext.

In this sense, Arndt?s nearest peers are Helen Levitt and Jerome Liebling, the latter of whom was his professor at the University of Minnesota in 1969 and 1970. Both Levitt and Liebling share his habit of turning photographic encounters into amicable mini-collaborations. Arndt also has their ability to engage people of different ages and races. One of the greatest compliments he ever received, Arndt says, was from an African-American television executive who told him that his photographs of Black Chicagoans were the first in which she couldn?t tell whether the photographer was white. Arndt?s photographs of groups of young people of color posing in Minneapolis and Chicago from the late 1990s and early 2000s (along with his pictures of beauty-shop windows, storefronts, and doorways) are images worthy of the great, socially engaged documentarians of the Depression era Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. They trace the changing demographics of regions long known for their white majorities.