Chris Arnade

Chris Arnade (; born ) is an American photographer and writer. He worked for 20 years as a bond trader on Wall Street; in 2011, he started documenting the lives of poor people and their drug addictions and commenting on the state of the society of the United States. He did this through photographs posted on social media and articles in various media, most often The Guardian. He does not call himself a journalist; some journalists object to his work and some sources refer to him as a journalist.

Arnade developed what he calls the McDonald's test, saying that a person's attitude towards the fast-food restaurant McDonald's indicates whether the person lives a life of relative privilege.

Early life Arnade was born around 1965 and was brought up in San Antonio, Florida, a conservative, Roman Catholic community. His father was of Jewish heritage, had escaped Nazi Germany and had become a professor in the US. His mother was a homemaker who raised a family of seven children (Chris has five brothers and one sister) and then became an academic librarian.

Arnade went to college and then to Johns Hopkins University, where he earned a PhD in particle physics.

Career Arnade started working on Wall Street in 1993 as a quantitative analyst. A former colleague told The Wall Street Journal that he frequently argued politics with other traders, most of whom were in the "libertarian wing of the Republican Party"; Arnade eventually tired of "hearing [traders] who had lost millions and gotten bailed out complaining that Obamacare raised their taxes." He also did volunteer work in the Bronx, with the Hunts Point Alliance for Children, which led him into engagement with people who lived there. In 2012, his mother died. The same year, Citi shut down the trading desk he was working on, due to new regulations. To deal with the reduced income, his family moved from Brooklyn to upstate New York. He also started getting his stories and pictures published in The Guardian and The Atlantic, which brought in some income. He mostly published on social media such as Twitter and Flickr. When Trump accepted the nomination as the Republican candidate for the 2016 US presidential election, Arnade was in Ohio, but not at the convention; he was in a strip club in Parma, a working-class suburb of Cleveland, watching people celebrate. He was an atheist during his Wall Street days, but says "it's more complicated now".

Works published