Carving a new spot at the top
It can be hard to shift perceptions of home. But when photographer Paul Arnold needed a fresh creative spark to reignite his business, he discovered Darwin was the perfect place to embrace change and find a new niche.
There isn’t much that photographer Paul Arnold hasn’t done to get the perfect shot – he once spent 90 minutes submerged in a salt lake to capture the sunrise – but suspending his body from a singleengine ultralight drifter to take aerial shots of the Northern Territory was a whole new experience. “I don’t like heights, my fingers were frozen from the cold and the only way to get a good shot was to hang over the side with my camera parallel to the ground,” says Arnold, 47, who’s lived and worked in Darwin and the Territory for 30 years.
There was much more riding on the adrenaline high than the photo. It was early 2017 and the landscape photography career that Arnold had spent 12 years building had all but been decimated by the smartphone. “In 2014, I sold five photos a day in peak season,” he says. “Then, overnight, everyone had become a photographer. To survive, I realised that I needed to do things differently.” To stay relevant, he knew he had to see the Territory from a fresh perspective.
Instead of gorges and sunsets, he now captures the NT from 10,000 feet in the air, challenging perceptions of scale and space and the Top End itself. “Now my work gets a reaction from people and I love that,” he says.
Reinventing a business is never easy, particularly when you have a family to support. But Arnold says he never felt alone. “Darwin’s business community is amazing – everyone gets behind each other,” he says. “And this is a city that really welcomes anyone with fresh ideas. Territorians embrace everything.” Two years after that first ride in the drifter, he’s opened his second gallery in the city and is also selling to overseas customers.
Darwin’s own rapid growth and evolution has had everything to do with Arnold’s success. “Now is absolutely the time to start a business here,” he says. “There’s so much development going on, there’s money being invested in technology, new jobs. There’s a real melting pot of people. The microclimate means you can go further more quickly and carve out your own spot. Darwin’s not going to stay a secret for much longer, believe me.”