The pleasures of viewing Roy Arden’s recent photographs and videos often lies in speculating about how such simple, even banal, images manage to resonate so intensely. Take Overpass, 2005, for example, a shot of an empty makeshift home—located beneath the highway of the title—constructed from flattened cardboard boxes and a concoction of refuse that includes, one somehow can’t help noticing, a pizza box, fecal brown splatters, shredded clothes, and some decomposing bread rolls.

The temptation to itemize persists with a pair of street-scene photographs from 2005. The title of one, Versace, refers