Met Temple
Bill Arnold
American, born 1941
1976
A night photograph printed from a microfilm reader‑printer that turns the Metropolitan Museum’s illuminated entrance into a ghostly, high‑contrast scene, the artist probing memory and the effects of mechanical reproduction.
What hits you is the bright, overexposed stairway floating above a dark reflective pool, with two shadowy figures and heavy film grain that reduce the museum’s classical architecture to a flickering, dreamlike presence.
By using a microfilm reader‑printer, Arnold foregrounds photographic mediation—showing how process, grain, and mechanical transcription alter what we read as evidence—and contributes to a strand of photography that treats reproduction and memory as artistic subjects.
Medium
Microfilm reader-printer machine print
Dimensions
10 1/2 × 14 1/8" (26.9 × 35.9 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Joseph G. Mayer Fund
Accession
380.1980
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
