Arimondi's early photography in the 1970s in Stockholm included portraits of the stars of Sweden's fashion, theater and dance worlds. His first two photography exhibits were in Stockholm and met with mixed reviews. But as he matured as a photographer and tapped into his fashion world contacts, Arimondi landed a number of commercial fashion jobs, including shooting for the Italian designer
Salvatore Ferragamo S.p.A.'s I.Magnin department store ad that ran in
Vogue. He also shot other artists and models for his own portfolio, including Grace Jones, the Norwegian actress, Liv Ullmann, and the American writer,
Norman Mailer. Arimondi's aesthetic vision was focused on fantasy and drama, and he prided himself on pushing limits. Although less well-known than his San Francisco contemporary, photographer
Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work was shown alongside Arimondi's in photography exhibits and books, Arimondi, too, was noted for his male nudes. Arimondi's compositions, though, often combined a dream-like affect with the sensual. His distinctive use of light and shadow also distinguished his work from that of other photographers of the time. Although his male nudes were published in a number of books and magazines around the world, and his photos were shown in galleries from New York to Tokyo, the exposure did not always translate into sustainable profits. Arimondi's work as a fashion model helped pay his bills. In his last years Arimondi's photography began to take a turn to social documentary with individual portraits of homeless men and women and images of construction workers on the streets of San Francisco. From the heady days of his international fashion career and the New York disco scene of the 1970s to the liberated gay culture of San Francisco during that decade to the growing toll of AIDS and homelessness as the 1980s began, Arimondi captured his times with photography others considered ahead of his time. ==Selected works==