Arturo Soto, Today, Something

Mexico City, Mexico

Please introduce yourself—what is your name, where are you from, what do you do?

My name is Arturo Soto. I am a Mexican photographer and writer living in Wales, teaching at the University of Aberystwyth.

What is your relationship with photography, and how did you get into it?

I got into photography when I was fifteen years old, at which point I already knew I wanted to be a filmmaker (I had even taken a course on film history for which my mother had to sign a waiver because it was for adults).

That year my father bought me an anthology book on photography on one of his business trips, and I became engrossed by the work of Cartier-Bresson and then street photography in general. I became convinced that I needed to learn how these images were made, a skill I thought would be helpful to have as a filmmaker.

I got my first camera the following spring and began my life-long process of learning about this extraordinary and complex medium. 

What do you think triggers you to photograph in a certain moment? Is it planned or solely driven by intuition?

Creative methods tend to sound ridiculous when put into words, but here it goes: the kind of photography I make is a mixture of reasoning and intuition. Both are at play when I recognize the potential of something to become an image, in an entirely subjective process.

Then I try to produce an image that transcends the subject’s physical manifestation. In the best cases, the picture becomes an allegory that establishes an aesthetic and sociopolitical position that conveys meaning.

What is the story you want your pictures to tell?

I’m not interested in using photography to construct conventional narrative arcs (an example of which are photo-novels) but in the possibility for photographs to build open-ended sequences that communicate intention and suggest emotions.

This explanation might seem abstract, but it’s common in art forms such as music, which can have a defined structure but don’t behave like language, which is what we use to tell actual stories. 

Which city would you like to visit the most, and why?

I would love to make pictures in Buenos Aires, which I have yet to visit. I have an idea for a project that revolves around the work of one of my favorite writers, Adolfo Bioy Casares, but it would require an extended stay and quite a bit of funding.

What is your personal relationship to cities, and how do you perceive them as places in general?

I have a meaningful personal relationship with only a handful of cities—Mexico City, Savannah, New York, Panama, London, and Oxford—where I’ve had the fortune of living for extended periods.

Those experiences have, perhaps inevitably, created a condition in which I’m never fully satisfied with a place because I long for specific qualities of the other ones. However, it also makes me appreciate their unique attributes, and it’s very fulfilling to return to them. 

Regarding your project «Today, Something»: What was your intention, and how did you come up with the idea?

I wanted to photograph the neighborhood where my family has lived for the past twenty-five years but had been mentally blocked from documenting systematically.

I came up with the idea while still in Oxford, during the first lockdown, once I knew I would return to Mexico after four years of absence.

I was eager to see my neighborhood again, even if I’ve always had mixed emotions toward Tepepan, an ambivalence born out of its characteristics (a hilly area far from everything) and limitations (lack of public spaces, old infrastructure, bad urban planning, etc.), all of which I tried to capture in the photographs. 

Which project did you never finish?

I started a project in Sunnyside, where I lived for a few months toward the end of my stay in New York. I couldn’t finish the project because the financial crisis of 2008 forced me out of the country.

Nevertheless, I made an image that’s very close to my heart of a florist shop at the intersection between Queens Blvd and Greenpoint Ave. The shop doesn’t exist anymore. 

What is that one thing you have never managed to photograph and is now gone for good?

There are way too many instances to list. At some point, it’s better to let go of images that didn’t materialize. Otherwise, they occupy a space in your mind that gets you stuck in the past, and I don’t feel that’s very productive unless you want to do something else creative with them, like using them as source material for your writing.

If you could travel back/forth in time, what advice would you give your younger/older self?

I would tell myself to switch to medium or large format cameras sooner. I invested too many years using 35mm cameras. Looking at the bright side, I got a lot of bad pictures out of my system during those years.

What do you prefer saying: «to take a photograph» or to «make a photograph», and why?

I like saying «to make a photograph» because it implies an intellectual determination to use the medium creatively and responsibly, which is not how most people use photography nowadays. 

What is the most interesting experience you have had while photographing?

I like it when someone joins me in an exploratory walk to make pictures, and they experience a change in perception after I photograph something they think it’s banal but then see its aesthetic or political prospects. 

It’s even more satisfactory if this happens in their quotidian environment, which they take for granted because they think they know it well. 

If it wasn’t for photography, what would you be interested in doing instead?

I would be a full-time writer, or if not art related, an urbanist (something I realized not long ago).

How would you describe one of your pictures to a blind person?

This is a tricky question because most of my pictures are about noticing the overlooked, although this presupposes that people have seen the actual thing or something like it, and the image asks them to shed their preconceptions and reevaluate it.

It would be difficult for someone born blind to experience that moment of transformation. But if pressed on it, I would describe my pictures as attempts to capture spaces and things that aren’t obvious but that make it worth going out for a stroll. 

What are you currently working on, and—if there is—what is your next project or journey?

I just moved to Aberystwyth, so I’m enjoying exploring its streets and marveling at its peculiarities.

My large format camera is broken, so I’m just making mental notes of what to photograph later while at the same thinking about how I can expand my visual language (which is a problem for those of us who tend to photograph the same things in more or less the same ways).

Thank you, Arturo!

Editorial Notes:

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Photography: Arturo Soto (2020–2022)
Location: Tepepan, Mexico City, Mexico

Links: Website, Instagram

Mexico City, Mexico

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