The sixty-ninth installment of Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book series enacts a quiet reversal of authorship: the photographs were made by Chris Arnold, and they were gathered and sequenced by his son, Corey Arnold, who appears in nearly every frame either fishing or displaying a catch. The pictures span 1978 to 1995 and center on the son’s early life around fishing; catalog metadata places key episodes in Southern California and Alaska, while the publisher describes fishing as the recurring subject throughout. Because the boy grew up to become both a professional fisherman and a photographer, these images carry layered meaning: they are family documents and also the raw material of a later artistic vocation.
The project’s interest lies in that relay between generations. Chris Arnold’s camera follows his son on trips and at the water’s edge, producing pictures that feel affectionate, direct, and unhurried, with the casual intimacy of snapshots that happen to be well seen. Corey Arnold’s editing gives them a second life, arranging catches, poses, and settings into an accumulation that reads as a study in obsession and tenderness rather than a simple album. The book is a collaboration in the fullest sense, even though only one person pressed the shutter.
Nazraeli’s One Picture Book format is small and exact: a hardcover volume of sixteen pages with sixteen color plates and one original print, as the publisher lists. That compactness suits the material, and the inclusion of the original print makes each copy a hybrid of book and portfolio. This title offers a quieter, more personal counterpart to Corey Arnold’s first monograph, Fishwork: The Bering Sea, published by Nazraeli Press in 2011.
For a collector, the appeal is not merely the imprint or the series number. It is the chance to see an artist’s formation from the inside, through photographs made by a parent before anyone could have predicted where the boy’s life would lead. The book’s subject, its collaborative structure, and its carefully limited form together make it a concentrated example of how private pictures can be re-read as public work.
