Matthew Arnold is a photographer living in New York City. He graduated from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where he studied photography. He also studied photography at The West Surrey College of Art and Design outside London.

Arnold’s photographic work explores our personal, historical and cultural relationship to this increasingly small and complex world. His newest project "Topography Is Fate—North African Battlefields of World War II," considers the varied landscapes of North Africa that the soldier of World War II was forced to endure. Thousands of miles from home, largely untraveled and ignorant of lands and peoples outside his home country, he was dropped onto the shores of what must have seemed to him a dangerous and alien environment—his understanding of the land limited to stereotype, myth and the relevant army field manual.

Informed by the New Topographics, his newest project entitled Topography Is Fate, creates large-scale photographs of North African Battlefields of World War II. These vast, anonymous, neutral vistas are bestowed a rare sense of quiet, transforming the North African landscape into contemplative spaces—a stark contrast to what was considered a dangerous and alien environment by the soldiers dropped into its vastness. With minimal visual signs pointing to the echoes of war, the viewer is left to contemplate, reflect and inject a level of their own sensibility into the photographs. Unlike other photographs of war, the power and strength of Arnold’s photographs creep up on you slowly, with an enduring impact.

"Topography Is Fate," has been exhibited and promoted widely across the United States and around the world in galleries and museums. In fact, it has also been published as a monograph entitled, "Topography Is Fate—North African Battlefields of World War II," by the German publisher, Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg. It includes a foreword written by Hilary Roberts, the Head Curator of Photography at the Imperial War Museums in Britain as well as an essay by Natalie Zelt, the co-author and co-curator of, "War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath".

His work will be exhibited as part of the Renaissance Prize at the Getty Images Gallery in London next month. Earlier this year it was exhibited at the Arsenale di Venezia, in Venice, Italy as part of the Premio Arte Laguna. It was also exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Guatemala, as part of the GuatePhoto Festival. He also exhibited the work in solo exhibitions in both New York City, New York as well as in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

His honors include being named a Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Traveling Fellow, a Top 50 Emerging Photographer of 2014 by LensCulture as well as a Photolucida, Critical Mass 2014, Top 50 Photographer. He was also recently a Visiting Lecturer at Columbia University, in New York City. At the beginning of 2015 he was included in an important exhibition at the MFA in Boston, Massachusetts entitled "Permanent War—The Age of Global Conflict".