Arthur Drooker is a photographer and author. He studied American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and graduated in 1976. As a teenager he explored his Bronx neighborhood with a Kodak Retina that his father gave him. He now lives in Marin County, California.
His books are American Ruins (Merrell, 2007), Lost Worlds: Ruins of the Americas (ACC, 2011), Pie Town Revisited (University of New Mexico Press, 2015), Conventional Wisdom (Glitterati, 2016) and City Hall (Schiffer, 2021). Since 2023 he has self-published Twilight, Light on the Land and Thirty-Six Views of the Golden Gate Bridge. His work is in the collections of the Library of Congress and the San Francisco Public Library.
Thirty-Six Views of the Golden Gate Bridge (self-published, 2024, 80 pages) began in 2022, when he asked himself whether he could see the bridge anew. He used Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji as a guide and gave himself three rules: no postcard views, only black and white, and unusual angles. The book includes an essay by Gary Kamiya.
