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up the history of modern art in the company of my art-obsessed grandfather
(and thankfully so) Flory and Myrtil Frank, who were art dealers themselves.

As the visitor who browses this retrospective exhibit, which covers the gamut
of my photographic and photojournalistic peregrinations, from my “wonder
years” growing up in Jamaica Estates, through my college years at Cornell,
which also coincided with the Vietnam War, through the magical summer
of 1969, where my photographic career began when I worked for the U.S.
National Park Service at Lake Mead, Nevada; through my travels across the
country since—can see, most of my photographic mentors, per se, have been
painters. If you look closely, you’ll see the shadow of the great realistic American
painters Edward Hopper and Charles Sheeler and several of the other artists
of the American Renaissance of the 1920s, which remains my favorite decade
(and I have the buck shoes to prove it).

You’ll also see a great deal of my life: the places I have been, the experiences I
have had, the people I have loved—and in at least one case, loathed (namely the
INTRODUCTION commissioners of the New York City Board of Standards and Appeals, the last
place where I had a “regular job”)—as well as the myriad times when I glimpsed
a moment, or a composition, or both, which I simply had to photograph.

If the photographer is interested in the people in You’ll also see a record, albeit a quixotic one, of the last six decades of American
front of his lens, and if he is compassionate, it’s history. The innocence of the World’s Fair, which coincided with the apex of
already a lot. The instrument is not the camera but The American Century, as the 20th century has been called; the War and the
the photographer. student rebellion of the 60s; 9/11; the motor styles, clothing styles, and, to
some degree, the mind styles (so to speak) of the last half century—all the
- Eve Arnold things, or at least many of the things which comprise “my” America can be
seen here.

This, it should be noted, is the second iteration of My America. In 1998 I also
SOMETIMES a gift can transform a life. That’s what happened with the Fujica mounted a retrospective of my U.S. photography at Taidehalle, the Municipal
35-SE my wonderful late Aunt Dina and Uncle Marcus Widmann gave me for Art Hall of Helsinki. That exhibit, which I mounted when Finland was emerging
my bar mitzvah way back in 1964, with which I immediately began recording from the twilight zone of the “Soviet time,” as that country’s difficult postwar
and documenting my world, which at that time was pretty much confined to period has been called, was intended to commemorate America’s long
Jamaica Estates, the inner suburb of New York where I grew up (three blocks friendship—as well as my own more recent one—with Suomi. It also was a
away from the current U.S. president): the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair, great success, as such things are measured, and a great experience. And one
which was just about to open, and the Museum of Modern Art. I hoped to be able to recreate at some future date. And so twenty one years
later, here we are.
Those were still the days before MOMA became the behemoth it is today.
My aesthetic, as well as my passion for photography were unquestionably The impulse behind My America 2 mirrors the one behind its predecessor.
influenced and enhanced by the many afternoons, I spent at MOMA, soaking Just as Finland was coming into its own, again, as a fully independent Western

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