“American Reflections” was named one of the top seven photobooks of 2023 by Le Monde. It’s a rich retrospective of Tom’s career, showcasing his dedication to honest and personal captures of people in the Midwest and their lives. Tom’s caring approach to the people he shoots speaks clearly in these images.
Here’s the Photo-Eye review, where you can page through the book and see a few images: [see the “BookTease” link in the lower left.] https://www.photoeye.com/bookstore/citation/ZK236/
And here’s a translation of the LeMonde review:
A late and little-known representative of American street photography, in black and white, Tom Arndt (born in 1944) was able to extend this tradition in the 1970s and 1980s, adding an irony and a subjectivity that are not without evoking the work of Lee Friedlander. This first monograph in French, well printed, shows his art of composition, which he practiced in different places, in particular in his hometown of Minneapolis (Minnesota). Playing on the reflections of the windows and on what can be read there, he extracts strange messages, slightly absurd visions, full of emptiness and melancholy, where he sometimes integrates his own reflection. And when he moves away from humans to focus on cars and trucks, Tom Arndt treats machines as a set of features and lines, as a sculptor or an abstract painter. This does not prevent him from taking an empathetic look at the countryside of his state, populated by cowboys who seem to have been in the wrong era.
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Richard C Hudson 