Photography is the currency of connection.
In a world heading toward escalating conflict, climate emergency, mass immigration, water wars and growing economic disparity, photography allows me to connect to the immediacy of my environment and grounds me to the present moment.
Reaching out to photograph the marginalized populations I encounter in my landscape connects me unexpectedly to a beauty and to a humanity that eases my own sense of isolation and despair.
An exposure can become an intimate 1/500th of a second relationship, allowing access to our shared humanity. My ongoing encounter with populations experiencing homelessness, drug addiction, incarceration and recovery help me see what I would otherwise refuse to acknowledge. It would remain overlooked and ignored.
These fractions of a second relationships of intimacy, the time it takes for an exposure, are an invitation to the Family of Man, even though it is a crazy and dysfunctional family filled with brokenness and beauty, sinners and saints.
Joanne Arnold
Joanne received her BFA in painting from Maine College of Art 1979 and began resurrecting her vision as an artist 10 years ago after a 27 year hiatus raising her three children. She initiated her practice of rising at first light each and every day, year round, to photograph in and around the Portland Waterfront. She hasn’t missed a dawn since.
This early morning landscape offered her an opportunity to show up to all she encountered, as a pioneer on the frontier of rediscovering her own vision and trying to make sense of a complicated world and her relationship to it.
This world includes a population experiencing homelessness, the Recovery Community and the fishermen of the Working Waterfront. She has chronicled her relationship and encounters with these populations on Facebook. This includes her three year involvement at MaineWorks (a for-profit B-Corp committed to providing dignified employment for those in recovery from substance abuse disorder and the recently incarcerated).
Beyond the human landscape, she encounters the world of intersecting light and object; from water surface to steel fabrications; from hulls to concrete walls, producing images no longer defined entirely by their subject or content. These images register a displaced moment (a reference to the poem GIFT by Rabindranath Tagore), a moment when the grip of rationality, logic and reason are suspended ceasing to define the image. These are images that some may refer to as abstract though they are entirely straightforward, literal and are not manipulated.
Joanne lives and works in Falmouth and is a frequent presenter at PechaKucha Portland, PechaKucha Kennebunk and recently presented at TedxDirigo November 2018 and TedxYouth at CEHS December 2018 (available on YouTube).
Instagram : #joannearnoldphotography
Find me on Facebook: Joanne Arnold
