Images for a lifetime

In one of Charles Arnold’s most memorable self-portraits,
the artist stares at the viewer while surrounded by an eclectic array of items:
an animal skull, an otherworldly plant, and a piece of architectural
ornamentation. But the strangest presence in the print, also staring out
(though somewhat cross-eyed), is Arnold’s hero, Wile E. Coyote.

            “Road Runner is always doing
terrible things to him,” says Arnold, “but he’s indestructible.”

            After
spending the better part of a day talking with Arnold and his wife, Ginger,
it’s not difficult to understand his identification with Road Runner’s nemesis.
Throughout his life, Arnold has had no shortage of occasions when he’s had to
gather himself up and begin again.

            He was happily married to his
childhood sweetheart, June, for 53 years until her death in 2000. A year later,
Arnold married Ginger, a long-time family friend who had also lost her spouse.
At the ages of 80 and 75, respectively, he and his wife act like young
lovebirds, holding hands and laughing together.

            Throughout his three-and-a-half
years of military service during World War II, and his career in photography
during a time of transition, there have also been occasions for starting over.

            But none of them have fazed Arnold.
His sense of wonder and youthful energy are firmly in tact as he leads me down
a beautiful gorge into the valley behind his Webster home. It’s a walk he takes
every day with his dog, Toby.

            “I know every blade of grass in this
valley,” says Arnold.

            But on
this day, the snow is a foot high and the path is as slippery as it is steep.
Arnold has advice on the best techniques for staying balanced by using a
walking stick. His wife calls him a mountain goat. Sure enough, he has no
trouble making his way down the path and back up again, pointing out the “snow
lizards,” sitting on tree branches along the way.

            Arnold
recently attended a high school reunion and had a terrible time. It’s not
difficult to figure out why; everyone else had grown old.

            Back at
the house, looking at his innovative electrostatic images, it’s tempting to
think of Arnold as an artist first. Using the most common of objects —
tissues, snail shells, and grass — and a Xerox machine, he conjures
compositions at once ethereal and surreal. Wispy ghosts of clouds course
through moonscapes populated by organisms not of this world.

            But Arnold is quick to insist, “This
is of secondary interest. My life’s work was not making images; my life’s work
was teaching.”

            Talking
to anyone who was fortunate enough to have studied with him during his 31 years
at Rochester Institute of Technology, it’s hard to argue against the idea that
teaching came first. When he retired in 1987, the School of Photographic Arts
and Sciences named its prestigious lecture series after him.

Born in 1922, Arnold grew up in a suburb of Providence, Rhode Island. His father was a
commercial artist in Providence, but many of his clients were located in
Manhattan. Arnold, who is known for his colorful stories, explains how his
father went to work.

            “When we
were kids, very frequently Sunday night we’d take my dad down to Providence and
see him off on the New York boat, an oil-fired steamboat,” Arnold says. “He
would have his supper as the boat was going out through Narragansett Bay and
then go into his cabin and sleep. He’d wake up in the morning and there would
be the Statue of Liberty. He’d get off and spend all day Monday seeing clients.
He’d get on the boat that night and get into Providence as the sun came up
Tuesday morning. He’d go to his office and start working. It was a wonderful
world that doesn’t exist anymore.”

            Arnold was destined to follow in his
father’s artistic footsteps, but he took a detour through the Navy when the
United States entered World War II.

            Arnold
was sent to Norfolk, Virginia, to learn to be an aviation radio technician. He
was not a good student and didn’t think he would pass the course but, as Arnold
tells it, he never had a chance to fail.

            “One morning I went to the mess hall
and had breakfast. I came back to the building we were put up in. I had my hand
on the door to open it and the building blew down. I’m standing there, there’s a
door jam and a door, and the building is gone. There wasn’t a scratch on me,
but I couldn’t hear very well.

            “The next day we heard that the
people on the other side of the airstrip saw a guy with a tractor pulling ten
depth bombs [designed to hit submarines] in trailers behind him. As it came up
to our barracks, one of them slipped off. The whole thing went off and left a
hole in the ground that was about 20-feet-deep and blew down three or four
buildings, including our school.”

            To this day he doesn’t know exactly
what happened.

            “One
thing about the military, they don’t immediately go out and tell everybody 100
people have been killed, especially during war. I don’t know what happened to
the rest of the people in my class or the people who taught it. The school was
gone.”

            Wile E.
Coyote, indeed. Arnold was dazed for a while and was sent to another post until
he could get his hearing back.

            His next
stop was a radar school but the Navy decided he would be more valuable as an
aviation radio technician. He joined a group assigned to maintain planes in the
Admiralty Islands.

            “We got to a small island and waded
ashore in time to wave to guys in an infantry landing craft,” he says. “They
were almost out of sight when a Japanese bomber blew them out of the water.
They had radioed that they were being attacked. The assumption was we didn’t
exist. We were on the island for three and a half weeks. It was beautiful, but
we didn’t have any food. There were coconuts, fish, and lots of shellfish.
Finally they found us. We had no idea if we were going to spend the rest of our
lives there.”

            Later he was assigned to an airstrip
at Tacloban on Leyte, an island in the Philippines.

            “Sometimes we were bombed four or
five times a day. You’d work on a plane and you’d have one ear tuned to what
someone was saying and the other ear was waiting for a Japanese plane to come
in. We got pretty good at jumping into holes.”

            Arnold not only survived the war, he
got married during a 30-day leave.

When the war ended he took advantage of the GI Bill, attending the college both of his parents had
graduated from, Rhode Island School of Design. He earned a degree in
illustration, but while a student, Arnold stumbled into the career that would
be his life’s work. He took a summer job working at RISD’s museum, learning how
to photograph art objects from the staff photographer.

            After graduating in 1949, he headed
to Manhattan to find a job. Coming up empty, he returned to Providence where
the museum photographer had just retired. Arnold was offered the job.

            He took it, but after a few years
the technical nature of the work left him bored. Wanting to retain him, his
boss asked what would make the job more interesting. Arnold asked to teach “a
little course in photography.”

            Despite the fact that there was no
darkroom at RISD in the early 1950s, and students processed film through the
drugstore, their prints were strong and the course was successful. The
following year, 1953, Arnold taught the course for credit.

            Although it may be hard to imagine
at a time when just about every art school offers photography, Arnold’s was the
first photography course taught at RISD. He could sense a growing excitement
about the medium.

            “That spring, one of the kids came
in with a magazine. We all looked at it and we were all excited. We’d never
seen it before. It was Aperture.”

            On the magazine’s back page was an
announcement that the editor, Minor White, was moving from California to the
newly founded Museum of Photography at George Eastman House. The students were
so taken by the magazine, they asked Arnold to get in touch with White and
arrange a visit.

            “We drove 11 hours to Rochester to
see Minor; there was no Thruway then. He had us over to his apartment up above
a hardware store, downtown. We sat up until one o’clock in the morning looking
at photographs. The next morning he brought us over to Eastman House and
introduced us to Beaumont and Nancy Newhall and George Pratt and James Card and
we watched a film. [Newhall was the museum’s first curator; his wife, Nancy, a
writer. Card and Pratt worked with motion pictures.] That evening we went back
to Minor’s. Sunday we went to the Eastman House and met Oscar Solbert, the
first director.”

            Arnold and his students were elated,
but they had to drive back to Rhode Island for Monday classes. Four days later,
Arnold received a letter from Newhall offering him a job.

Arnold took the job even though it proved disruptive to his family life. His wife, who had just
given birth to their second child, moved in with her parents in Rhode Island
and Arnold got to know the long route from Rhode Island to Rochester very well.

            On
weekends that he didn’t visit his family, he would go on shooting trips with
White.

            “Minor
and I would go out photographing together,” Arnold says. “I did very little
photographing, but I got so close to how his thinking was that I’d drive along
out in the country and I’d stop the car and he’d get out and take a photograph.
He didn’t tell me to stop the car; I knew. One of the reasons I didn’t do
photographs myself was I knew I was making Minor’s photographs. I so admired
the things he was doing, I would just sense it.”

            Toward the end of the summer, his
wife arrived. While they spent a week looking for a home, Newhall allowed them
to stay in the small apartment on the third floor of the Eastman House.

            “I’m one of the few living people
who has legally slept in the Eastman house.”

            The early years in Rochester were
not easy for the Arnolds. They found a small home near the University of
Rochester. The basement had a dirt floor, a coal furnace, and a ceiling so low
that Arnold had to dig a trench just to get to the furnace standing up. He was
paid so little at the Eastman House, he had to take another full-time job as
night manager of a dairy near the airport.

            “I’d come home from Eastman House,
get in my white uniform, shoot out to the dairy and work till 1 am. I had to be
back at the Eastman House at 8:30. I’m not an early riser; it was painful.”

            By the second year at least there
were some perks.

            “Beaumont
used to invite me to come over to his dinners Saturday evening. I used to have
meals with Beaumont, Nancy, Ansel Adams, and the Weston boys [Edward Weston’s
sons]. Beaumont was a gourmet cook. He’d get up at five in the morning and
start preparing the sauces he was going to serve us at 8 o’clock at night. The
food was good and the company was interesting.”

            But, once again, Arnold was getting
bored with his job. Newhall wanted to keep him on the staff, because of his
particular expertise.

            “I could pack stuff to be sent to
Chicago or San Francisco and it would be bomb-proof. I had leaned how to handle
works of art. He asked me what he could do to keep me.”

            Arnold had the same desire he’d had
at RISD; he’d like to teach a workshop. Ten people signed up and, once again,
it was successful.

            But at the end of the 10-week class
Arnold was unhappy again.

The following week a phone call came in to Newhall’s office. C.B. Neblette, of RIT, wanted
to speak to Arnold. Arnold had never heard of RIT or Neblette, director of the
School of Photography.

            Once Newhall filled him in, he made
an appointment to see Neblette. The secretary showed him into the tiny downtown
office and Neblette pulled two cigars from his desk drawer.

            “I said, ‘Thank you, I don’t smoke.’
He lit one up and started talking. He told me about how he’d worked for Kodak
and Kodak had arranged for him to come to RIT and set up this photography
program. It was very interesting, but during that time he also smoked the other
cigar. I was getting sicker and sicker. Forty-five minutes went by, he looked
at his watch and said, ‘I’ve got an appointment.’ He got up and shook hands.
When I left, I went downstairs and stood on the sidewalk and threw up in the
gutter. That was my introduction to RIT.”

            Though Arnold hadn’t said more than
two sentences during the interview, he got a job offer a week later. It turned
out that two of the students in his Eastman House workshop were RIT faculty
members Ralph Hattersley and Neil Croom.

            This time Arnold held out for a decent
salary; one job was enough. He got it.

            “I spent 31 years there and I loved
it. I loved teaching and the challenge of dealing with the rest of the
faculty.”

            Arnold explains that the faculty, at
that time, was built around technology, and most faculty members didn’t
understand the instructors who dealt with the “art” of photography.

            “The rest of the faculty looked at
us like we were a bunch of phonies because we weren’t teaching the right
stuff.”

            Along with Arnold, Hattersley,
Croom, and White designed a BFA program in photography. Arnold was appointed
chairman. All of them are now revered as pioneers in “art photography”
education.

            “But you couldn’t use the word art,”
Arnold says. “Photography’s for snapshots!”

In the 1950s, photography was by no means accepted as art. There had been pockets of
respect in the United States, notably Alfred Stieglitz’s photo-secessionist
movement. But, as Arnold points out, Stieglitz made his biggest splash showing
modernist paintings at his gallery.

            “Photography was documenting stuff
and that’s not art. Even during the Farm Security Administration, even thought
there were wonderful things created there, the whole premise was to document.”

            Newhall had begun to make inroads by
showing photography at the Museum of Modern Art, where he was a librarian
before the war. After the war, MOMA hired Edward Steichen to become its first
curator of photography. But that didn’t necessarily mean respect for the
medium.

            “Right after the war I was in New
York and saw a show at MOMA,” Arnold says. “It was remarkable to see a show of
photography in a museum. It was a small show, it was a nice show, and it was in
the basement hallway between the men’s room and the ladies room. They didn’t
let photography come up to the first floor.”

            Most RIT students were not
interested in photography as an art form, either. They were preparing for jobs
as portrait, wedding, or advertising photographers. But Arnold soon found
others who were as enthusiastic about the medium as he was, especially one couple.

            “Nathan
Lyons and Joan Lyons really started making people think about photography
here,” Arnold says. “Nathan went to Eastman House and opened it up to a much
freer feeling about showing local contemporary photographers. Then he started
Visual Studies Workshop. Nathan’s bright and, intellectually, he was very
interested. He was much more scholarly than I’ve ever been. He read about what
people were doing and would write very intelligently. And Joan had the
touchy-feeling thing. With Joan, it was always, ‘Wow, amazing! This is an
opportunity to do something I’ve never done before.'”

            As the aesthetic frontiers of
photography expanded in the 1960s, definitions loosened and a spirit of
experimentation was embraced. For Arnold, this meant a radical departure from
most people’s notions of photography.

            “Early on, I got to the point where
if I never went in another dark room again I’d be delighted because I was bored
with darkrooms,” he says. “I was much more interested in getting images going.
One of the reasons I got involved with Xerography was, I found that with this
Haloid equipment, I could set up a still life, make an exposure, and make a
print in seven minutes. If it didn’t come out like I wanted it to, I could fuss
with it and make another one.”

            Arnold’s electrostatic experiments
got under way when “Dusty” Rhodes, a former research scientist at RIT who had
gone to Xerox Corp., sent a flat-bed copier over to RIT for him to “play with”
in the late 1950s. Arnold still has it in his basement studio.

            Over the
next several decades, Arnold would become a major figure in the growing field
of electrostatic art. Since the 1970s he has exhibited and lectured throughout
Europe. He has also made several trips to Brazil and, in 1995, was guest of
honor at the First Studio Internacional de Electrografia in Sao Paulo.

If Arnold was a
natural-born teacher, he was also an unconventional one.

            “The
first thing I would say to my classes when they never saw me before was, ‘I’m
Charlie Arnold, call me Charlie.’ The second thing I would say is ‘You have two
choices in this life; you can be miserable or you can be happy. I choose to be
happy and if you prefer to be miserable, I don’t want you in my class.'”

            That sort of philosophy made him
endearing to generations of students, including Jerry Uelsmann, Carl Chiarenza,
Paul Hoeffler, and countless others who went on to carve out their own niches
in photography.

            Arnold may be known for
electrostatic images, but he is no slouch when it comes to traditional
photographic processes. In his home is a large picture he took of an exhausted
Minor White.

            “We worked all night on an issue of Aperture and this was in the morning
when the sun came up and into his kitchen. He was really wiped out, weary.”

            The majority of his images, however,
are non-traditional. Some are done using a hands-on process involving the early
Haloid (Xerox) machine, but many are Xerox scans. Arnold would take objects and
ride them along the light as it scanned through to copy.

            “Beautiful stuff happens.”

            Indeed it does, even if Arnold is
using nothing more than a piece of tissue, a feather or a blade of grass. He
can seemingly create art out of nothing.

“I’m making something
I can’t even see.”

            In 1995, Arnold was awarded a
fellowship to travel to the International Museum of Electrography in Cuenca,
Spain, where he spent two weeks working with two technicians.

            The resulting work is typical of his
magic. He found most of his raw materials while walking on a mountain trail. On
paper, he created his own mountain landscapes from found objects, printed on a
color copier.

            Through it all, Arnold’s Wile E.
Coyote past would catch up to him from time to time.

            One evening, after taking the job at
RIT, he went back to the Eastman House for a lecture. During the reception that
followed he met a Japanese visitor, a professor of comparative literature from
Osaka University who had come here to study the work of Adelaide Crapsey, a
poet from Rochester.

            “We
really hit it off. I invited him home and we had dinner together and we sat and
talked. He enjoyed being around my family. Finally I asked him, ‘Where were you
during the war?’ He said, ‘I was a light bomber pilot.’ I said, ‘Where were you
primarily in action?’ He said, ‘Toward the end of the war we did raids two or
three times a day on the airstrip at Tacloban in the Philippines.’

            “Here we were sitting and talking
together. This was a guy who was trying to kill me and I was trying to kill
him. The little yellow devil — we had been taught to do anything to kill him.
He had the sensitivity to come all the way here to study poetry. We both
laughed.”

This article appears in Mar 19-25, 2003.