©Arturo Soto, from the series Border Documents, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.

Arturo Soto: I don’t really look for them, since I tend to photograph where I live. In this way, making work is a means of better understanding places. Photographing over time alters my relationship to the city. I have often started a project following a particular set of aesthetic or conceptual parameters, only to realize that I need to change course to represent what I have now learned I want to emphasize.

©Arturo Soto, from the series Border Documents, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.

YM: George Perec’s work and what he called the infraordinary, a concept rooted in the post-WWII nascent consumer society, but also Perec’s losses, have a major influence on your practice. Tell us more about the infraordinary and how it became a tool of choice for you.

AS: The register of Perec’s The Rue Vilin was crucial in determining what I wanted to achieve. In this short text, featured in the compendium Species of Spaces, Perec describes the street where he used to live with his parents before he became an orphan. While the topic is very different from Border Documents, which is about my father’s memories of growing up in the Mexican-American border, I learned a lot from Perec’s matter-of-fact narration of emotional events.

©Arturo Soto, Border Documents book spread, The Eriskay Connection, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.

Some critics have described this approach as “flat affect,” similar to what occurs in certain photographs. For instance, those associated with the New Topographics, in which the landscape is rendered in a seemingly neutral way while also conveying the artist’s sentiment about the scene recorded.

Another Perec book, I Remember, helped me to formulate questions for my father as I gathered his memories. Other writers, such as Walter Benjamin, Nathalie Sarraute, and Guy Debord, were also crucial in shaping the texts, particularly in terms of their length.

©Arturo Soto, from the series Border Documents, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.

©Arturo Soto, Border Documents book spread, The Eriskay Connection, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.

YM: The relationship between words and images is central to your work. How do you nurture this delicate dialogue between the visual and the textual?

AS: There’s a longstanding debate in photography about how to expand the range of experiences the medium can capture, a pressing issue for images of the urban landscape, which often come across as too dry or banal. Words can help us access emotional values elicited by places and spaces, complicating the dynamics and expectations of viewership. The interplay between photography and text can open up the possibility of affective interpretations. While it is feasible to express emotion solely through visual means, texts can prompt a different kind of response, especially if the human figure is absent or plays a minor role in the landscape.

©Arturo Soto, Border Documents book spread, The Eriskay Connection, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.

However, it’s essential to determine what kind of relationship the two will have if they are to coexist in the same space. In Another Way of Telling, John Berger wrote that closed image/text relations could turn into “dogmatic assertions.” Therefore, it tends to be more interesting when they are in tension with each other. For that to happen, one must think in advance what one wants to accomplish with each medium, so that their confluence creates a third space for the viewer to complete the work.

YM: You’re an accomplished critic and write for many outlets. What compelled you to write about other photographers and their work?

AS: I wanted to improve my writing, as well as my analysis of photo books, which can be challenging because they often lack a clear narrative. Writing about image sequences is less straightforward than reviewing other media, where part of the review is dedicated to summarizing a plot. In photobooks, making sense of the images and then translating that experience into words becomes the main point, although it is also necessary to consider the semantic possibilities of the book as an object. Does the relationship between the subject matter, its realization as an image, and the material properties of the publication amount to more than the sum of its parts? I’m a slow writer, partly because it takes me a while to find engaging ways to express my conclusions. I don’t like reviews that read like rehashed press releases. There’s very little value in that. Criticism should spark reflection in the viewer, allowing them to find their own position in relation to the work.

Arturo Soto’s review of Bharat Sikka’s AND THEN book, published by Fw:Books, 2024. See C4 Journal: https://c4journal.com/bharat-sikka-and-then/

YM: We both graduated with practice-based PhDs in Europe. How has art research transformed your photographic practice, and does it still influence your work?

AS: Research is central to my practice. It’s an attitude and a starting point. Producing a body of work usually requires acquiring knowledge related to a topic. Doing a practice-based PhD is an exercise in balancing how much you need to know to make something. It can be futile to conduct endless research if it doesn’t lead to anything concrete. Research doesn’t have to be didactic or even show up overtly in the finished work. My preferred approach is to create a framework and then hide the scaffolding, as I tried to do in A Certain Logic of Expectations and Border Documents.

This happens in literature all the time. If a novelist wants to write about firefighters, and they have no prior knowledge of that world, they research enough to be able to write their novel, even if their intellectual labor won’t be evident to the reader. In fact, it can be a compliment if the reader realizes at the end that the author must have researched quite a bit to pull this novel off. At that point, the research has become inseparable from the work. Nevertheless, the relationship between history, theory, writing, and making is complex, and each person will approach it differently.

YM: Your new book, Border Documents, published by the Eriskay Connection this year, is set in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, two cities separated by the US/Mexico border. Black-and-white photographs coexist with notes, recollections, anecdotes, and stories from the 1950s-1970s. It is as much an archival project as it is a contemporary exploration of the urban spaces where your father grew up. In addition, the book is as much a first as it is a third-person view. Within that structure, there is something deeply touching about how you captured the spirit of each place you photographed. Memory, lineage, distance, and life events weave a rich tapestry in your book. Can you retrace the design process and decisions that led you to this form?

AS: The design of Border Documents began while I was still doing my PhD. By the time I submitted my thesis, after five years of work, I had designed four different dummies. While the last version was suitable for the degree, many things changed when The Eriskay Connection decided to publish the book. Rob van Hoesel (the designer/owner) suggested several changes that improved the book. These included using a landscape orientation, printing the images full-bleed, and settling on a modest size with a softcover. The conceptual core remained the same as in the dummies, but his expert eye was crucial in refining the typography and text layout for the new design. The cover was inspired by a Secession Exhibition poster I saw at the Leopold Museum in Vienna. The idea was to allude to the border fence, and Rob did a fantastic job adapting it for the book.

YM: What does photographing in a warming world mean to you?

AS: I’m conflicted by the implications of using analog technologies. On the one hand, shooting on film gives me great pleasure. I like the constraints it imposes on my process: carefully exposing the film, sending it out to the lab, waiting for it to come back, evaluating the negatives, holding them in my hands, storing them, and finally, scanning them. Yet, I’m aware that chemical photography pollutes the environment in multiple ways, from the extraction of minerals used for emulsions to the (usually incorrect) disposal of darkroom chemicals. However, the making of digital sensors is not neutral either. It’s also based on mining, except that the geopolitics of chip production are even more convoluted. The storage of digital photographs in the cloud is also problematic in terms of water consumption. There is no easy solution. When using analogue technologies, at least I get to side with a photographic lineage and history that I identify with.