Keith McArthur’s American Fatalism

Detroit-based photographer Keith McArthur fell in love, not with the art itself, but with the camera (and the idea of a girl who owned one) when he was 15 years old.

“The girl I was dating at the time was taking classes and I would drive around rural Michigan with her taking photos of old silos, barns and bridges or whatever,” he tells us now, at the age of 28. “I think I fell in love with the camera as an object first. This piece of metal with all these buttons and dials. It was like a big ass decoder ring for getting a girl to make out with me in the back seat of her car.”

Thirteen years later, that girl is long gone (“[she] broke up with me, but I kept the camera and ran with it”) and Keith has instilled all that he learned from her, the Canon AE-1 he had his father buy for him with money he had saved up at an after-school job, and his time on a US Army Base in Maryland (where he tell us he “learned literally everything there is to know about photography” in the four years he spent in the military) into a portfolio of work depicting contemporary interpretations of classic Americana. Keith credits his style to the early influence of Robert Frank, whose book The Americans—the only photographic book in his local library—he kept on loan for a year.

“I immediately identified with the sort of American nostalgia but was also fascinated by the idea that photographs didn’t have to be these shiny, perfectly lit images I would see in magazines. Frank lead to Shore and Eggleston and I think those guys’ books really shaped how I see the world photographically.”

As well as the tattooed, beer-swilling girls, the gun-nuts and the 4th of July fireworks, Keith’s work also incorporates more gentle and introspective ideas in his pictures of his son.

“Photographing my son, Maverick, over the last nine years is definitely something I get a big kick out of. And it’s less of an immediate thing, and more like, “I can’t wait to look through these together as old men”. I suppose everything I press the shutter for is so I can look back on it years from now.”

The idea of just pressing the shutter is one that feeds into the classic photography adage—”f/8 and be there”—about being at the right place at the right time. Keith references the philosophy in his website f8alism, which also ponders “where “there” is supposed to be.”

“It’s just about loving to take photos and not worrying about doing “shoots” or “projects”. It’s just having a camera on you and using it instinctively.”

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