hris Arnade is a complicated man. In 2011, after working for eighteen years as a Wall Street bond trader and making enough to live with his family in a large, upscale apartment in Brooklyn, he decided to visit the Hunts Point neighborhood in the Bronx because he “was told not to.” His fellow strivers had warned him of drugs, prostitutes, and poverty, but because he “wasn’t in the mood for listening to anyone,” he decided to visit anyway.
Camera in hand, Arnade started making lengthier trips, exploring parts of New York he’d never seen himself and taking photographs of people he met. He chose to go on foot, his only goal getting back to that Brooklyn apartment at the end of the night, and allowed the suggestions he received along the way to inform his ad hoc itinerary.
What these trips began to teach him was “just how cloistered and privileged my world was and how narrow and selfish I was.” He decided to start pulling out the insulation that fellow bond trader Sherman McCoy prizes in Tom Wolfe’s novel Bonfire of the Vanities, and to go in search of the Americans his well-heeled colleagues had many opinions about but rarely encountered.
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