Today we’d like to introduce you to Traci Arney.
Hi Traci, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
Photography is how I move through the world. It gives me a way to look closely at things I’m trying to understand, particularly the things that aren’t always easy to put into words. My work has explored our relationship with food and disappearing traditions, the experience of abuse, and the instability of memory. The subjects may seem very different, but for me they come from the same place: using photography to question, understand, and connect with the world around me.
I have been a photographer for more than thirty years. My formal education began at Oxford University and continued at Arizona State University, where I earned my BFA in Photo Studies. I was trained in the darkroom, and I think that foundation still has a lot to do with how I see and make images today.
Professionally, I spent about twenty years shooting weddings and commercial work while continuing to develop my fine art work alongside it. Teaching photography has also remained an important part of my career, in both public and private settings.
Over the past several years, I’ve increasingly focused on creating, exhibiting, and sharing my work in museums and galleries. That has brought national and international recognition and, just as importantly, connections with artists and larger arts communities that have become an important part of my artistic growth and help push my own work in new directions.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I don’t think art is ever a particularly smooth road. Coming out of a university program like I did, you leave knowing technique, art history, and hopefully how to make work that is both beautiful and convincing. What you don’t necessarily know is how to survive as a working artist.
There is a reason the phrase “starving artist” exists, although it has always bothered me. We know how valuable the arts are, not only culturally, but in the way they encourage empathy, critical thinking, creativity, and even how we learn in other disciplines. Yet making a living as an artist can still be incredibly difficult.
When I left school, reality arrived pretty quickly. I worked in a professional darkroom and then began shooting events. Lots and lots of events. Somewhere along the way, I also had to learn how to run a business, market myself, pay business taxes, find clients, keep those clients happy, and keep enough work coming through the door to pay the bills. Most of that you learn by doing it, usually while you are already doing it.
And then there was life. I was raising a family while trying to build and sustain a career. My fine art work never really went away, but there were long stretches when there simply wasn’t much room left for it. Making the work you need to make requires time, thought, and a certain amount of mental space, and those can be luxuries when you are focused on keeping everything else afloat.
It took me a long time to create that space again. Life gets in the way of art pretty often. I think part of being an artist is continuing to find your way back to it.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I am a classically trained photographer, and that foundation is incredibly important to the way I work. I believe a photograph should be as beautiful and carefully crafted as I can make it. Beauty isn’t just decoration for me. Beauty gives the viewer time. If an image is visually compelling, someone is more likely to stop, stay with it, and discover what else is happening beneath the surface. Some of my work deals with difficult subjects, from abuse to our relationship with food, and beauty can give a viewer a way into a conversation they might otherwise turn away from.
I also like to walk the line between reality and surreality. Many of my photographs feel completely possible at first, but something is just slightly off. I think of them almost as visual puzzles. A novel has twists and turns, music has crescendos and quiet passages, and I want a photograph to have that same kind of movement. I want you to recognize something, question it, then look again. I can be fairly obsessive about the details as well. A single finished image may represent forty or fifty hours of work, sometimes down to individual pixels.
That connects directly to the way I think about photography itself. I believe photography can speak about truth, but I don’t believe a photograph is ever completely truthful. From the moment we pick up a camera, we make choices about what the viewer will see and what they won’t. Even in documentary work, we are creating a particular way of seeing something.
What am I most proud of? Photography. It’s my love language. Having a camera in my hand gives me a kind of freedom I don’t always have without it. I’m naturally very introverted, but the camera gives me permission to enter a room, take up space, approach someone, ask questions, make a connection, and really look. It gives me a reason to be there and, in some ways, the authority to be there.
What does success mean to you?
Success, for me, is time. How much time can I convince someone to give a photograph?
When I am standing in a gallery watching someone encounter one of my photographs, my definition becomes very simple. Did I earn five seconds? Thirty seconds? Long enough for them to discover something that wasn’t apparent at first? Long enough to turn to the person beside them and start a conversation? Maybe long enough for the image to come back to them later?
I tell my students all the time that my job as an artist is to capture and maintain my audience’s attention long enough for the work to lodge itself somewhere inside them, so they can revisit it even after they’ve stepped away. That’s where the conversation can continue.
They don’t have to love the work. They can even hate it. Sometimes a viewer sees something entirely different from what I intended, and I love that too. Once the work leaves my hands, I don’t get to control what someone brings to it. But if they stop, look, question what they’re seeing, or start talking about it, the photograph has done its job.
If someone walks past without ever really seeing it, that’s the failure. If I can make them stop, I’ve succeeded.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://traciarney.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/traciarneyphoto/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/traciarneyphotography
