Dustin Edward Arnold seamlessly transitions between roles as designer, photographer, and creative director, fundamentally reshaping how audiences perceive objects, images, and narratives by elevating commercial work to the level of fine art. As Executive Creative Director at Revery, Arnold has established a unique creative path where design and photography function not as separate disciplines, but as interconnected stages of a unified narrative process.
Arnold's journey into photography began through his background in design, particularly his early work in the beauty and luxury industries. This experience taught him that high-end products are often created as much for the imagination as for practical use. While designing packaging and products, he began visualizing how these items would photograph and how they might exist as symbolic totems rather than mere objects. For Arnold, photography became not simply documentation, but the completion of a creative vision—the final act of realizing a narrative. "The most powerful articulation of an object, subject, or idea was the mythology an image could make," he explains.
Throughout his career, Arnold has achieved significant industry recognition, with his work featured globally in prestigious publications including Time and I.D., as well as in institutions and festivals such as DD Design Directory and Art Basel. He has earned over forty international awards and was named one of fifty winners of the prestigious ADC Young Guns 5 award, which honors the next generation of creative talent in visual media and design. In 2008, he received the Young Alumni Innovator award from Art Center College of Design for his unconventional approach to image-making and brand building, and that same year was selected as one of Print Magazine's Top New Visual Artists. Two years later, Computer Arts UK featured him in "The 10 Best Designers You Don't Know About (Yet)."
Revery, Arnold's creative home base, operates as a multidisciplinary studio with locations in Portland, Los Angeles, and New York. The team collaborates with brands and artists worldwide, guided by a mission to protect and nurture the stories that define shared humanity. At its core, Revery works to ignite recognition, belonging, and love—values that are embedded into every collaboration. This philosophy extends beyond mere mission statements into active practice, treating love as an active discipline, viewing community-building as a responsibility, and making the uplifting of voices through mentorship, funding, and creative support integral to the studio's identity.
Sustainability remains central to Revery's operations, from hiring locally to participating in industry initiatives like Green the Bid, demonstrating the studio's commitment to advancing creative work toward more ethical and people-centered practices. "People above all else" represents a core value that Arnold and his team hold closely, with projects built on principles of inclusivity and belonging to ensure that diverse voices and perspectives shape the stories they tell. As Arnold states, "cultivating difference is the only way to create work that truly reflects the world we live in and aspire to."
Arnold's photographs rarely exist in isolation, instead emerging from larger creative systems that incorporate sculpture, set design, fabrication, and material experimentation. "I care a lot about what I put in front of the camera," he explains. Sometimes he fabricates materials himself, while other times he collaborates with skilled artisans to bring tactile visions to life. He describes his photography as physical, deeply rooted in surfaces, textures, and what he calls "the poetics of matter."
This attention to craftsmanship carries through to his creative process, with each project beginning in his phone's Notes app before crystallizing into a comprehensive pre-production book containing thesis statements, storyboards, and mood references. Sets are meticulously built, lighting is thoroughly tested, and materials are carefully sourced. Most importantly, his detailed preparation coexists with a willingness to let the work surprise him during execution. "What I photograph dictates how I photograph," Arnold explains.
However, precision can present its own challenges, as Arnold learned while photographing burlesque performer Dita Von Teese for an eyewear campaign. The ambitious concept demanded significant mid-shoot adjustments, and the necessary pivot proved difficult but reinforced an important lesson about creative flexibility. "Even with a great team, it became obvious I wasn't going to be able to pull off the entire vision as planned," he admits. "Sometimes the best outcome is not from forcing the vision, but from listening when the work starts talking back."
Among his most influential projects is "Putesco" (2009), Latin for "to rot" or "to decay," created in collaboration with Nick Cope. What began as documentation of sculptural works constructed from rotting cloth evolved into a comprehensive body of images that merged decay with classical aesthetics. The collaborators used the actual materials from the sculptures as photographic backdrops, allowing these materials to dictate the mood and presence of the final work. "That one gesture opened a portal," Arnold reflects, noting how the project shaped his philosophy of letting materials guide narratives—a principle that continues to inform his current practice.
While he downplays the importance of equipment, Arnold acknowledges that his toolkit mirrors his creative approach: deliberate and sometimes impractical. He shoots with a Phase One IQ3 100MP camera and vintage Broncolor Grafit A4 strobes, equipment that is as demanding as it is cumbersome. "It's unwieldy, expensive, and impractical, a perfect reflection of my image-making approach," he jokes.
What excites Arnold most is exploring territory beyond the traditional boundaries of photography as currently understood. He references photographer Nick Knight's assertion that the medium has already outgrown its name, sharing this belief and viewing his own practice less as photography and more as a dialogue between artifacts, disciplines, and technologies. He is currently exploring projects where a still image can generate soundscapes, interactive forms, or spatial installations. "I'm drawn to processes where a photograph becomes something else entirely: where a still image generates a soundscape in TouchDesigner, or where a portrait translates into an interactive form," he explains. "I'm exploring how photographs can be used as seeds and can propagate their meaning, story, and character into other mediums—3D, spatial audio, film—each one like a memory: an echo or mutation of the original. It's less photography, and more of a conversation between artifacts, each imbued with their own context and meaning."
At its heart, Arnold's work has consistently focused on perception rather than mere capture, mythology rather than documentation. Whether through rotting cloth, sculptural sets, or cutting-edge media technologies, he constructs images that complete realities instead of simply recording them. His photographs resonate with viewers because they function not just as images, but as echoes that extend into memory, myth, and the imagination, establishing new possibilities for what commercial photography can achieve in the contemporary art world.
