Artist Statement | “Faroe Islands: Elemental” allowed me the opportunity to have my photography and writing enter into a dialogue. As an analog photographer, I primarily use medium format film and a Holga, an inexpensive plastic camera with minimal controls for focus and exposure. This approach allows me to embrace a lo-fidelity aesthetic that employs traditional imperfections—such as soft focus, distortion and light leaks—to suggest landscapes of memory and daydream. For me, this optical environment amplified the islands’ surreal landscapes, ones in which uncanny topographies and atmospheres disrupt perceptual expectations. Each micro-essay is a reflection on an elemental aspect captured in the photograph—and a means to compound their visual and textual legibility.

Philip Arnold's photography has appeared in Apeiron Review, Compose, Cerise Press, Gravel Magazine and in the recent issue of Black & White Magazine as a winner in the 2018 Pinhole/Plastic Camera Contest. In 2018 his work was exhibited in the Silicon Valley Plastic Camera Show, 10th Annual Curious Camera Exhibit and the Somerville Toy Camera Fest. His essays and poems have appeared in Rattle, The Iowa Review, Midwest Quarterly, apt, Adventure Cyclist and Sequestrum.