My name is Natalie Arriola. I am a photographer and writer currently living in Fresno, CA. I try to find beauty in the dust, heat, and agriculture which make up California’s San Joaquin Valley. I like to say that “The Grapes of Wrath” was about my family.

A lot of what you will find here is landscape and nature photography. You will also find moody images of interiors and exteriors from my home, hotels, and the homes of my friends and family. As well as portraits and posts of occasional studio work. I am not the kind of artist who believes that I have some great message to pass on to my viewers, but rather that my viewers bear the message by way of what they find in my work.

I also enjoy conceptual photography and am currently working on developing a more comprehensive body of conceptual work.

30th October 2011

Photo with 5 notes

No Caption 1 This is the first of a series I am starting. It is inspired by a book I recently found while visiting Powell’s Books in Portland, Or. The book is called “Evidence” by Luc Sante. It is a collection of crime scene photos taken by the NYPD from 1914 to 1918. I was intrigued by these photographs. Most of the photos are in no way attached to any explanation of the scenes they capture. The victims lie anonymous in their final postures. Sante discusses the fact that they are mostly ordinary people who lived their lives under the public radar. The capturing of each victim in these photographs after their death becomes a sort of revelation of ordinary existence, the irony of course being that that existence has been caught only upon its extinction. The final expressions and poses, the rooms and alley ways, the bar room floors and junk yards where we find these people fascinates me and I have set out to create my own crime scenes in hopes of conveying something of the mystery of death, it’s suddenness, and it’s ordinariness. Our fear of death hyperbolizes it into a monster or fiend, but in reality it is the most ordinary of things, just as ordinary as the lives of those it takes.

No Caption 1

This is the first of a series I am starting. It is inspired by a book I recently found while visiting Powell’s Books in Portland, Or. The book is called “Evidence” by Luc Sante. It is a collection of crime scene photos taken by the NYPD from 1914 to 1918. I was intrigued by these photographs. Most of the photos are in no way attached to any explanation of the scenes they capture. The victims lie anonymous in their final postures. Sante discusses the fact that they are mostly ordinary people who lived their lives under the public radar. The capturing of each victim in these photographs after their death becomes a sort of revelation of ordinary existence, the irony of course being that that existence has been caught only upon its extinction. The final expressions and poses, the rooms and alley ways, the bar room floors and junk yards where we find these people fascinates me and I have set out to create my own crime scenes in hopes of conveying something of the mystery of death, it’s suddenness, and it’s ordinariness. Our fear of death hyperbolizes it into a monster or fiend, but in reality it is the most ordinary of things, just as ordinary as the lives of those it takes.

Tagged: photographyportraitcrime scenehorrordeathbloodwoman

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