Biography
BIOGRAPHY | Matthew Arnold is an American landscape photographer whose work strives to connect the specificity and significance of history with the topography of the land on which the history is shaped.
His work has been exhibited and promoted widely across the United States and around the world in galleries and museums. His previous project was published in 2014 as a monograph entitled, Topography Is Fate—North African Battlefields of World War II, by the German publisher, Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg. It includes a foreword written by Hilary Roberts, the Research Curator of Photography at the Imperial War Museums in Britain, along with an essay by Natalie Zelt, the co-author and co-curator of War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath.
Arnold was recently named a 2020 Critical Mass Top 50 Photographer by Photolucida. In 2021 Arnold will have his first major solo exhibition of his Amelia Earhart project at the Turchin Center for the Arts at Appalachian State University. This past summer he was asked to jury the Earth Photo Prize for the Royal Geographical Society in London. In 2019 he had his second solo exhibition at Happy Lucky No.1 Gallery in New York City for a parallel project entitled Ghosts and the Longing for Amelia. Ghosts is a multimedia project born of a long period of introspection. The project created a new perspective on process, and a deeper understanding of how obstructions in the path of life can ultimately lead to a different and possibly more revelatory direction in the creative development of the artist.
In April of 2018 Arnold exhibited Topography Is Fate as a solo exhibition at the Gravy Gallery in Philadelphia. Previous solo exhibitions of Topography Is Fate have taken place at both Happy Lucky No.1 Gallery in New York City as well as at the Metropolitan Gallery in Philadelphia (organized by The Center for Emerging Visual Artists where he was a Fellowship Finalist). In 2016 he was a finalist for the Renaissance Prize at the Getty Images Gallery in London. His work was exhibited at the Arsenale di Venezia, in Venice, Italy as part of the Premio Arte Laguna. It was also exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Guatemala, as part of the GuatePhoto Festival where he also gave an artist talk about his Topography Is Fate project. In 2015 his Topography Is Fate project was also included in an important exhibition entitled Permanent War: The Age Of Global Conflict at the Grossman Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Awards and honors that he has won include being named a Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Traveling Fellow in 2014. He was named a Top 50 Emerging Photographer of 2014 by LensCulture and was exhibited at the Valid Foto Gallery in Barcelona, Spain. He was also named a Photolucida, Critical Mass 2014, Top 50 Photographer and exhibited in Guatemala as part of Guatephoto Festival 2015. His project was a Shortlist Candidate for the Vevey International Photo Award in 2015. He was also a Visiting Lecturer at Columbia University, in New York City in 2015. Matthew Arnold recently moved to Los Angeles, California after having spent over twenty years in New York City.