Kaleidoscopic No. 24: Arturo Soto
the experience of the now through the dérive...
Leonardo Bravo:
Hello Arturo it’s great to connect with you. I was really taken by the quality of your images, the narratives that are embedded into your photographs about place and their context, so I was eager to have a conversation. I know that you're based out of the UK but you're currently in LA and I'm now in Brooklyn, so it’s wonderful to connect across timezones with you.
Arturo Soto:
I'm excited to talk to you and I really enjoy your work as well!
Leonardo Bravo:
Thank you so much. We can start off with broad brush strokes about your work and then look specifically at some of the individual series that you've published.
Arturo Soto:
Well, I studied film and photography, which is relevant in the sense that I’ve always had an interest in visual narratives and in writing. Lately, I've been combining photographs and texts, trying to expand on the affective capacity of photographs, looking into how they can communicate the feelings and opinions I have for places. Overall, I would say that the main subject of my work is the urban landscape. I have photographed the cities where I've lived, translating my experiences of those places.
Leonardo Bravo:
I was so intrigued by that because I was looking at your bodies of work about Ciudad Juarez and Oxford and I was interested in your ability to capture place in such different cultural and geographical contexts.
Arturo Soto:
That's always a challenge because you don't want to photograph in a way that merely captures what people already know, which intrinsically puts into question what an interesting photograph is. The fact that now everybody has a camera not their phone has made it clear that interesting images tend to circumvent the picturesque. Even if the subject is banal or commonplace, an interesting image still hinges upon its ability to reveal something transcendental about it. The way you make a photograph can challenge people's expectations of what a good photograph is and what kinds of subjects are worth being depicted. That is crucial when photographing a new place, especially when a city is widely associated with a set of cliches. It is also not easy bringing something new to the table when working in a documentary manner, although it helps having an interest in the sociopolitical dimension of the urban landscape so that the pictures work on different levels.
Leonardo Bravo:
Let’s talk about some of the specifics of your projects. Maybe we can start with Border Documents because I think the corresponding images have a pretty interesting narrative based on your family history?
Arturo Soto:
That’s right. I was born in Ciudad Juarez, but I never lived there. My father just wanted me to be born there. I grew up in Mexico City but we travelled to Juarez all the time, so I became very familiar with a particular experience of the United States and the fluid transnational life of the border. Unfortunately, it is now very common for that whole region to get reduced by the media to a number of long-standing problems such as illegal migration and drug trafficking. In reality, there's a lot of legal migration between Juarez and El Paso. Many people live in one city and work in the other. That was my father’s experience, and he doesn’t come from a privileged background. My grandfather worked in construction, as a night porter, and as a handyman. The stories in the series wanted to capture how different things were 60 years ago, when the border was severely underdeveloped but more lively. My father has always liked telling stories about his youth there, before he moved to Mexico City to go to university. What I got from those stories really contrasted with the city I saw in the late 80s and 90s, when the social decomposition accelerated, resulting in lots of crime and corruption. The Juarez from his stories was much more dynamic and full of hope because its social structures hadn’t collapsed.
Leonardo Bravo:
And very high femicide rates.
Arturo Soto:
Exactly. The 90s was when things started to get really bad. And so at some point, years later, something clicked in me, and I realized that I should explore everyday life in Juarez through my father’s stories because that side was not portrayed in the media. International newspapers only showed corpses and illegal migrants crossing. Those problems are real and very important. They should definitely be covered, but not exclusively. What is always lost to outsiders when confronted with those images is that people from all walks of life still live in Juarez. This gap in representation often happens in conflict zones across the world, where little is said about the everyday life of their inhabitants, so I wanted to capture that dimension, which I think is as political as the migrant crisis and drug trafficking.
I decided to interview my father, collaborating with him to gather some of his experiences of growing up there. We eventually travelled there together, which was really important to me. He took me to all the sites where his stories had unfolded and stood right next to me when I made the pictures. However, I still had to mold or shape the stories in Border Documents to make them shorter, about a paragraph long, and more literary. I say that because sometimes the stories were too long or had a non-linear structure, which is very common in oral narratives, so I had to frame them in way that made sense to an international reader while retaining their inner truth.
Leonardo Bravo:
Yeah. I loved that the stories come out as so human, so vivid. And then there's also the absence of people in most of the images. Looking at the image with the “Caseta Telefonica” sign makes me think about how people, in our own human ways, make meaning and sense of place in disjunctive ways. Sometimes these juxtapositions can only make sense to the people that organized these settings in public places. So it's interesting seeing your images because you see so very few people but also you see this need for people to make meaning, to create context, to put their stamp into their urban landscape.
Arturo Soto:
That's right. There's no people, but there's all kinds of traces of human activity and the choices people make.
Arturo Soto:
And you can infer people's attempts to survive economically or to have a political voice, or you see markers that relate to the specific social dynamics of the border, which has so much to do with the exchange of products and labour. I grew up before NAFTA, the trade deal between Mexico, Canada, and the US. Back then we would bring stuff from Juarez that wasn't available in Mexico City. I grew up consuming a lot of basic American products at a time when they were a luxury. I’m talking about cheap stuff like Chips Ahoy or Lucky Charms. They're obviously common now in Mexico, but at some point, the access to those products made life in the border different from the rest of the country. I strived to capture some of those specificities through the stories and the pictures.
Leonardo Bravo:
And then, switching over to In The Heat, you published that as a book, right?
Arturo Soto:
Yes. I made the pictures in 2010-11 and the book came out in 2018.
Leonardo Bravo:
So why this choice to photograph Panama City?
Arturo Soto:
I moved there because that’s where my partner at the time lived. I was there for almost two years. Our relationship didn't work out, but I had plenty of time to explore the city. I think it’s common to have strong emotions for a place, especially when it’s not what you wanted or expected, and so I tried to reflect that in the work. Sort of my issues with the country and my struggle to adapt. I know it sounds obvious, but not all art comes from a happy place where everything works.
Leonardo Bravo:
Of course.
Arturo Soto:
Panama City is also very humid and it's kind of hard to live like that, or at least it was for me. I’m not used to that climate, so that's where the title comes from. It's a play on words, because it also refers to the expression ‘in the heat of the moment,’ right before things shift. The series is my subjective take on the capital, but heavily influenced by my dissatisfaction with my life there. I also wanted to capture some of the historical and sociopolitical dimension of the urban landscape, some of which resulted from the economic boom that Panama went through. When the economy slowed down, many high-rises were left unfinished, which gave some quarters a unique look. Unsurprisingly, the city is very developed in its rich areas, almost like Miami, which is what Panama aspires to be. But on the other hand, there's markers everywhere that this is still Latin America, you know? These contradictions in the landscape are exactly what I was after.
Leonardo Bravo:
It's a kind of case study of the speed of economic boom and bust cycles that hyper capitalism dictates and pushes forth.
Arturo Soto:
Absolutely. I can imagine you know this experience well because you lived in Berlin, and the Germans have an idiosyncratic way of dealing with their recent history. It's been very painful to them, but they eventually had to face their history, which has been positive for the psychological well-being of the country. But not every nation does that. In the case of Panama, the US invasion in the 80s was very traumatic for them. When I was there, I could sense that they were still processing that trauma. Some of the places and things that I photographed point to traces of that period.
Leonardo Bravo:
The other thing I find striking about your work is the incredible use of color. I trained as a painter so I'm very keen on how colors relate to each other in terms of saturation and tones. There's some images in your UK series where the browns and ochers and pinks show up to present a special kind of softness of contours that is so memorable.
Arturo Soto:
Thank you! I used a high saturation film for A Certain Logic of Expectations because the UK is often overcast <laugh>. I was trying to extract the most color out of those scenes. You have to make do with what you have, you know? Gray skies can be a blessing and a curse. I actually enjoy photographing in that kind of weather, but it comes at the price of colors being more subdued. Using a high saturation film gives you tones that are closer to how your eyes see. Obviously not every picture in that book has the same intensity of color, but you would be surprised at how often people photograph without paying much attention to the chromatic character of things. For me, photographing in color means trying to incorporate that into the meaning of the photograph. I try to take advantage of what colors say about a city.
Leonardo Bravo:
I don't know if you have a title for this one, but this image of a corner wall area with pink tones and then the green underneath it. It's obviously a wall segment of concrete, but the banality of just the rote architectural reinforcement of a corner contrasts with the subtlety of color and the details so that the image slowly open up. I was so struck by that one!
Arturo Soto:
I'm glad you like that image because I think it's very representative of the project and what I tried to achieve. I want images that are aesthetically pleasing but that also refer to some sort of historical or sociopolitical aspect of the city. These corners were planned to prevent people from pissing on them. However, they now fulfill another function, which is to discourage homeless people to sleep near those buildings. There's a lot of homeless people in Oxford because it's a wealthy city, and they move knowing they can survive on donations and with the aid of a few institutions. But there will always be other kinds of institutions embodied in this type of architecture, that is against them. The pink makes the photograph very attractive, but there is a darker subtext that the viewer can discover.
Leonardo Bravo:
Yeah it's very effective. I was reading on your website that your practice is informed by the French writer Georges Perec. He talks about the nothingness that comprises the bulk of our lives. I'm intrigued with that on many levels. Can you talk about the way you reconfigure and recontextualize cultural histories? You were talking about Berlin and the presence of the past and the way that past is dealt with or understood. But I'm interested also in how you frame this, this sense of nothingness and how we make meaning of that nothingness?
Arturo Soto:
I think Perec’s understanding of nothingness is very related to how photography can transform things. If you're photographing from the real, everything can look obvious and banal but you can transform it by putting a frame around it. And then, the relationship between images also creates another level of meaning, which is what happens in a photo book, where sequencing can transform the banal even further into a narrative discourse. I think that's mostly the struggle with photography, you know? How to make something obvious worth looking at. In that sense, Perec was really instrumental for me because he's doing the same with words. In one of his most famous works he sits in a cafe in Paris to document life as it happens. But he takes this very seriously and to an absurd degree, attempting to record everything. And of course he can’t and he knows that, but he wants to give the reader the impression that he's unveiling the mechanics of everyday life via this absurd exercise, while at the same time he’s trying to figure out how to translate his experience of the now into something worthy of reflection. What emerges from this exercise is that everything happens in the present, but not all experiences are equally valuable, and the difficulty of living lies in determining the value of an event, which is a moral as much as an aesthetic decision. Towards the end of the book, his attention becomes more selective, which also relates to photography. When you can photograph anything, how do you decide what to photograph? You have to determine and impose some sort of criteria. In a way, the books I've made are my criteria for the cities they depict.
Leonardo Bravo:
So within that, how does your own sense of self become informed by traveling and seeing such different contexts? For example you mentioned you grew up in Mexico City and that you attended the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, and then you went to the UK. I mean, that's a lot of different realities or present moments that you've encountered.
Arturo Soto:
I think that my personal trajectory has fostered a creative impulse to analyze the cultural context of things and situations. That’s why I push against this idea that globalization makes everything the same, which I find very reductive. Of course, in some cases, or in some aspects that is true. But surely every place has it’s own specificities. I think living in different countries has, at the very least, primed me to search for these differences. Sometimes these details are precisely what the locals have stoped registering. So, if there's anything that a foreign view can bring to the table when representing a city is paying attention to obvious things that many take for granted, but that can set apart a city or a town from others.
Leonardo Bravo:
Right. I grew up in the south of Chile where many Germans emigrated in the late 1800’s, so there was always this unconscious appeal or connection to Germany that I've had from when I was a kid. And now I'm married to a German woman and we have a child. And that I've experienced living in Berlin there's also a kind of romance that I've attached to this place and its fascination with history and the confluence of so much culture there. But it also made me realize I'm an expat, and the way I look at the world is different than their cultural habits and norms. At some point, these differences really begin to jump out and become more pronounced. So, I came to realize that in some very basic ways, I look at the world from an American perspective, and ultimately I need things to work through my frame, my lens to the world, you know?
Arturo Soto:
Well, exactly. So if I understand you correctly, what you’re describing is a kind of friction, made up of those things that you bring to a place and those that the place gives you.
Leonardo Bravo:
Absolutely!
Arturo Soto:
Many people fall for the easy conjecture that only local voices matter, or that all foreign views are superficial. I don't think that. If you approach a place with respect and an open mind you will learn its specificities, and then you can say something about it, because it has now become a part of your experience. I think that's clearest in the Oxford book, A Certain Logic of Expectations. Like Berlin, it's a city that has a very complex history, but I thought there was little value in just rehashing its well-known myths, many of which, by the way, you hear from the locals again and again.
Leonardo Bravo:
Let's talk about your inspirations along the way, either through your upbringing or family education and the way that's shaped your vision.
Arturo Soto:
I went to a German school in Mexico City and that was a huge influence, mostly in a negative way. I hated the language back then and the school didn't have much interest in the humanities, so I just wanted to be done with it. I really had a great time at SCAD, academically and socially. I felt incredibly lucky to be learning what truly interested me. When I started the program I tried to do street photography in the spirit of Cartier Bresson, until I discovered the work of photographers like Steven Shore and Lewis Baltz that represented the urban landscape with a deadpan aesthetic. Another crucial formative moment was seeing the iconic exhibition Cruel and Tender. I just happened to be in London when it was on view at the Tate Modern, and it rocked my world. Later, when I moved to New York to do an MFA at the School of Visual Arts, I became very interested in political art because of Bush’s nefarious policies. In the end, the work I made for my thesis show wasn’t very successful but the MFA was an interesting journey because I got to try a more conceptual approach to photography.
Leonardo Bravo:
As I mentioned, there's some amazing tensions that I find in your work. There's both absence and presence, there's displacement and voids. How do you intentionally seek out those tensions? I imagine you travel through the city and you find those labyrinths, those pathways where you can find these moments. In some way, your work made me think or reminded me of Antonioni a little bit. The way he frames scenes and the way he uses color. There's a similar sense of ennui that I get from your images.
Arturo Soto:
Well, I really appreciate the comparison! You're right in thinking that an important part of my process is walking in the city, trying to discover unusual spaces. In that sense, the Situationist concept of the dérive has been very influential for me. I would quickly describe it as getting lost with the purpose of subverting the socioeconomic expectations that the city imposes on you. The point is to not conform to the ways in which it interpellates you, which can be as simple as exploring what lies at the end of a cross section precisely because it seems pointless. Sometimes you walk and there's nothing, but other times you discover the most wonderful opportunity for a photograph. What's great about this way of working is that it really allows you to roam cities based on your intuition.
Leonardo Bravo:
So what's coming up for you in terms of projects?
Arturo Soto:
At the moment I’m working on projects about Aberystwyth, where I live and teach in Wales, and about Los Angeles, where my partner lives. Both are challenging places to photograph because of their scale. Aberystwyth is a very small town, and so finding a distinct angle has not been easy. I am incorporating images of nature for the first time. At the opposite end is Los Angeles, which is immense, so I made the decision to photograph only in Downtown, trying to capture how it changes in the run of the 2028 Olympics.
Leonardo Bravo:
As a final comment, again, I really love the quality of your work with color but also what you're able to do with the tones in your black and white images. They're just very evocative and I just wanted to give you props for that.
Arturo Soto:
That’s very kind of you, and it just makes me think once more why I disagree with the notion that everywhere looks the same. It doesn’t! Otherwise, all places would be equally attractive or repulsive.
Leonardo Bravo:
Yes. There are particularities to place and culture.
Arturo Soto:
Even if it's true that McDonalds are everywhere, just to take the most basic example of globalization, their presence in the landscape differs depending of where they are in the world. The one in the center of Oxford was at the end of a street that couldn’t be more British, and which looks very different from the ones in the center of Mexico City.
Leonardo Bravo:
Well, Arturo, this has been such a treat, and I really hope at some point to meet in person. If you're in New York, please come visit.
Arturo Soto:
Absolutely. I would love to meet you in person and have a beer or a coffee or whatever you like.
Leonardo Bravo:
Si, un par de cervezas!
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