'Roy Arden has been active as an internationally exhibiting artist since the late 70’s. He has played a major part in the development of Vancouver as an internationally recognized centre for the production of contemporary photographic art. Regularly seen in significant local, national and international exhibitions, Arden's work is included in important museum collections in Canada, Europe and the U.S.A., including The Art Gallery of Ontario, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart.

Arden’s work can be divided into three periods from 1981 to the present. From 1981 to 1985 he produced a body of photographs entitled Fragments. These were colour photographs of a lyrical nature which recorded lived experience in the form of portraits and studies of urban details. Fragments was inspired both by modernist literary models like James Joyce as well as various photographers -- especially the German photographer Wols. This period was essentially concerned with the poetic expression of experience. Although he later sought a less subjective mode, Arden sees Fragments as important for developing his pictorial skills.

The second period, from 1985 to 1990 was spent engaged in what Arden has referred to as 'meta-photography', meaning that he did not act in any traditionally defined role as a photographer but instead made art about photography. He used historical photographs from the local archives in combination with other materials to create series and installations as catalysts for discourse on social history, photography and their interrelation. For example, the work Abjection (1985) was both an elegy for the internment of Japanese-Canadians in 1942 and a poetic musing on the ontology of the photographic. This second period could be characterised as being largely concerned with the photograph as index or document and a questioning of photography's 'truth value'.

The third period begins in 1990 and extends to the present. Arden’s interest in local history and modernity would now be pursued through images of the present that evidenced both traces of the past and the abrupt appearance of the new. These pictures present evidence of the social and economic history of Vancouver and it's environs, what he has termed ‘the landscape of the economy’, in tableaux influenced as much by the history of painting as the traditions of artistic photography. A photograph such as Landfill, Richmond B.C. (1991) is a searing image informed by a contemporary ecological consciousness but also invokes the problematic history of the picturesque landscape.

After a decade of colour, Arden recently been making black and white pictures because he felt that colour is often read as a transparent, unmediated representation. The Realism he is interested in is not delusionally transparent, but rather critical and self-conscious. In 2000, Arden began to produce digital video works which extend his project into the problems of the durational image. These works are not narrative, but are instead a sort of ‘breathing tableaux’. Of the video Citizen (2000), Arden has written: “My intention with this video was not documentary, I am interested instead in an allegorical realism that emerges from concentrated attention”.

Arden’s recent interest in the new world of imagery on the internet has manifest itself as the project “The World as Will and Representation – Archive (2004)”. Essentially a slide show of his personal archive of 10,000 images gleaned from the internet, it is viewable at www.royarden.com.