Faces of London couldn’t possibly be a more appropriate title, as it is hard to find a photograph in this book that doesn’t include a human face set in a typical London background. However, if this book was simply titled: ‘Faces’, it would still capture its core as the main subject of Arnoud’s photographs is people and the stories that exist in the faces he shows us.



Arnoud is a street photographer in the purest sense. He appears to have little interest in landscapes, natural beauty or manmade forms. Arnoud is interested in people. The kind of people all of us meet every single day when we are out and about on the streets of the cities in which we live, work and play. To him, anyone is a subject worthy of a photograph as everyone has a story and more often than not that story is laid bare in the face that he sees.



To me, Arnoud’s special talents are his eye for the uniqueness of the individual and his ability to capture more than just the obvious in the form of a photograph. I joined Arnoud when he went up to Notting Hill for the carnival and brought my own camera. I tried to follow in his footsteps, took pictures of the same people at the same time as he was shooting them but as we compared our haul at the end of the day I was struck by the fact that my pictures felt as if they showed just the bare facts of what was there when I pressed the shutter while in Arnoud’s photographs these same bare facts seemed to come alive almost to the point where I could once again hear the Wailers and smell the jerk chicken.



Arnoud is also a very unlikely street photographer. Arnoud is far from the typical New York-style in your face street photographer. Arnoud is more like the silent assassin who shoots from the hip and captures his subjects in those moments when the guard is down and real feelings are visible.



Arjan van Houwelingen