Exploring the Specificities of Place, from Panama to Oxford

Photographer and sociologist David Schalliol sat down with Mexican photographer and writer Arturo Soto to discuss his artistic practice about the built environment and how people experience and represent it. During their conversation, they discussed several of Arturo’s projects, including All Lovely Things Will Have an Ending (2006), which documents a number of banal spaces in Savannah, Georgia, a city known for its beautiful historic district; In the Heat (2011–12), a subjective depiction of Panama’s urban landscape; A Certain Logic of Expectations (2016–20), which proposes a counter-narrative of the British city of Oxford that resists the visual imperatives imposed by the architecture of its ancient University; and Border Documents (2015–19), in which he collaborated with his father to produce images and short stories that challenge the stereotypes associated with the border between Mexico and the United States.

DS: When did you first start to think about photographs in relationship to each other? And how did that take form in your first projects?

AS: Street photography was the genre that really captured my attention in high school. Those pictures function as one-offs, meaning each picture tells a different story, like in the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson or Garry Winogrand. While studying for my BFA in Photography, it took me a couple of quarters to open my mind to other kinds of picture-making. A lot changed after an assignment where we had to make a typology like Bernd and Hilla Becher. I did a typological project on a particular type of stairwell that is common in Savannah, Georgia, where I photographed those stairwells all over the city.

While I knew their work, operating in such a manner changed my mindset about seriality and defining a criteria for linking pictures. Except that in a typology, that is pretty obvious because they are all of the same subject, so there is no need to create this abstract mental space to figure out how to sequence images, especially when they don’t have anything to do with each other, or at least not in an apparent way. Toward the end of my studies, I made a typology of doors and windows. I loved being on the streets, studying different city areas, mostly on foot. Once I got a car, I would photograph nearby neighborhoods that weren’t part of my daily routine. I don’t think I was fully aware that I was developing a methodology for understanding where I lived.

After finishing my degree, I stayed in Savannah for a few months to photograph it in color using slide film (a photographic education in and of itself because you need to be very precise with your exposure). The resulting series, All Lovely Things Will Have an Ending, captured different aspects of the place, rather than focusing on just one thing. Once you have accumulated enough pictures, you run into the problem of editing them, both in the sense of selecting and sequencing them. I believe this is a lifelong learning process, as every series presents challenges. When you are done with one series, you must learn how to do it all over again with the next one, which will have its constraints and specificities.

DS: Part of what excited you about photographs in relation to each other was the city in general, another part was exploring a place that you didn’t know, and a third was that you are learning in a new way. Taking that all together, you create a theme that continues throughout your work: the city. Why is the built environment your subject of—or object of—study?

AS: When photographing a place, you are allowing yourself to be in areas you wouldn’t usually go to. That will enable you to compare different social dynamics, architectural styles, or urban designs. I’m not an expert on urbanism—and the little that I know I learned later—but when I started reading about how urbanists break down the landscape in books like Lynch’s The Image of the City, Relph’s The Modern Urban Landscape, or Jakle’s The Visual Elements of Landscape, I realized that those were the same categories of things I paid attention to. In a way, reading these books legitimized my visual thinking about the city and prompted me to look even more analytically at the uses of the land and the many ways social and economic markers are present throughout a city.

That is important because when I moved to New York to attend graduate school, I made work about other topics inspired by artists that were political with a capital “P,” but it didn’t really pan out the way I wanted. It took me a long time to realize how I wanted to reflect the world critically but more subtly (the kind of realization that makes going to grad school a worthwhile experience). The pictures I was interested in were not a direct critique of a political event, nor did they capture the headline news, but they were attempts to document the world via the built environment, which is as good a conduit to speak about economics, culture, and different social realities.

DS: That leads me right to the next question related to something that captivated me about your series In the Heat: the iconography of the city. You present explicitly political, religious, community, and commercial icons alongside what are effectively the informal icons of the contemporary city: things like the maladapted tree, the multipurpose sports court, and the person who is in desperate trouble. Given your interest in the infraordinary (roughly meaning, the banal and habitual) and reading the city, how do you interpret those icons in the everyday city?

AS: For me, it only works when I photograph where I live. I have nothing against people traveling across the world to photograph, but I want to understand the places I see every day. My process probably happens to everyone: I’m like a sponge and hyper-aware of everything when I move into a city, but then, as time passes and a routine emerges, I become a little bit numb or complacent in my looking. Time must pass to make certain pictures. Then, one day, I realize the photographic potential of a site. It can be anything: a street corner I know well or a sign outside a supermarket that I hadn’t really considered. I just needed to detach the subject from my tedium.

If you see things critically, then you eventually understand that not every place is the same and not everything is obvious, but sometimes you can only do so when you are immersed in the culture you are photographing, and it is usually not immediate. Some signs or symbols in In the Heat project took time to identify. If you are foreign to culture, you may not know what they mean. Oddly, the difficulty of doing so increases the more unexceptional they are, which is why some of these signs or symbols are political with a minor “p,” because they have been seamlessly incorporated into people’s lives.

DS: What do you think is the effect of that visual repetition of those icons, those representations of power in the city? What is the effect of it in its regularity or, perhaps, its banality?

AS: Some people take them for granted or just register the ones they are familiar with. In other words, they can be dismissed because you don’t know them or because you know them too well, but these markers are everywhere, and photography becomes one way to collect them. That is what a photographic series is, a collection of images, and a photobook creates a perfect context for these collections of signs and markers, amplifying the friction that arises when you put them in distinct combinations to establish a discourse.

For In the Heat, I was interested in showing different kinds of architectural styles. The city was visibly divided into Caribbean architecture designed for the humid weather, and these high-rises that became very common after the country’s economic boom. For the most part, whichever style dominated in an area related to issues of class, age, and profession. The financial implications of this kind of societal change were exposed with the Panama Papers when the lack of morality behind the flow of money that everyone could see in the form of cars, clothes, and buildings became concrete. There is a picture in the book in which you see a few high-rises that weren’t finished because the investor’s money dried out, revealing how precarious some of these operations that change the appearances of cities can be.

DS: This way of thinking about capitalism and neocolonialism in Panama makes me think about how you address representation in In the Heat and A Certain Logic of Expectations, which is about Oxford, England. In other words, you explicitly frame your work in Panama as a counter to how Oxford frames itself as a protagonist of colonial power. The dynamic that enhances the image of Oxford diminishes Panama—unless it is advantageous to Oxford. Putting these two bodies of work together, how are representation and self-representation written into the built environment?

AS: One of the things that I like to do before photographing is to research how the city has been previously represented to determine what constitutes its dominant narrative. An intriguing book called The Spirit of Cities: Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age, by Daniel A. Bell and Avner de-Shalit, encapsulates this approach from a sociological standpoint, analyzing the dominant ethos of nine cities, including Oxford. Obviously, some cities are more complex than others, but it is equally true that people tend to reduce even complex cities to only a handful of markers of identity. This understanding of cities can also be interesting in the opposite direction, when places aren’t in people’s imagination or aren’t known for many things.

In the case of Panama, I was very interested in brochures and the visual language of tourism. The ideal itinerary of those brochures is to arrive in the capital, spend a night or two there, go to as many malls and restaurants as possible, do some ecotourism on the weekend about three hours away, and then come back to the city for more shopping and dining before leaving. Culture tends not to be a part of that proposition at all, which is dependent on a particular kind of lifestyle consumption that’s very narrow. This cycle doesn’t lend itself to developing imagery about the city, or at least not to the same level captured in movies, novels, plays, and records about places like New York.

The positive aspect of creating imagery of a city is that people develop a sense of what its everyday life looks like. Even if people glamorize New York, especially if they have yet to live there, they are familiar with its nitty-gritty aspects too. The everyday life of Panamanians is not considered in these commercial representations of the capital. What I’m also trying to get at is that pictures like mine are not revolutionary or transgressive in any way, because what they are trying to do is depict things that are either taken for granted by the locals or are just absent from the conversation when selling an image of a place. For me, that is where the interest lies.

DS: Let’s shift a little bit to think about the process of representation of your own work. A Certain Logic of Expectations opens with photographs, but the effective beginning of the book is a spread with text on one side and an image on the other. This is a remarkable shift from your previous book, which was almost exclusively about the image. The only time text appears in that book, it is authored by someone commenting on your work almost as an afterward. And so, before we even talk about the content of the text and the image, why did you want to pair the two in this project?

AS: The logistical explanation is that I was doing a practice-based PhD in Oxford on the subject of the intersection between text and photographic images. I have always found it interesting how many photographers think that text shouldn’t play a role in photobooks. This is slowly changing, thankfully. I am interested in literature overall and how words can add a different dimension to images (to all images, not just photographs). I have participated in too many critique sessions during my studies, but also as a teacher, when someone refuses to expand on the context of their images, really taking to heart that they speak a thousand words. That motto gets repeated an awful lot, so my stock response, in an equally cliched manner is that words like “love,” “blue,” and “nation” can’t be exhausted with a thousand images either, so I don’t think this logic is a productive way of thinking about the function of words in relation to photographs. There are so many different contexts and ways in which words can influence images and vice versa, and I just wanted to create bodies of work that contributed to this area.

DS: How do you conceptualize the directional relationship between the text and the photograph in this spread? The visual organization of the text on the left and the image to the right causes me to turn to the text as a guide for the image. How do you see the “promise of images” and “compromise of words” in that pairing?

AS: Language can be explicit, whereas photography tends to be more open-ended. However, the confluence of these two systems yields a third meaning. There can be a one-to-one relation between the text and the images—what happens in Border Documents—or they can flow on parallel tracks, informing and influencing each other without serving as illustrations or captions, which is the case of A Certain Logic of Expectations. In the book, the images don’t explain the text, or vice versa, but what they have in common is that they encompass my experience of Oxford, hopefully instigating a sense of curiosity, or even bafflement, in the reader/viewer so that they question what they are reading and looking at.

Perhaps it is also helpful to know that I developed a little system for the book. The square ones are of places of the university, just not the expected ones featured in the many coffee table books available. The rectangular ones are of places outside of the city center, which most tourists don’t see. Oxford is not very big, but I wanted to show places that represented the social dynamics of the city, which have not changed much since medieval times. The struggle remains between the people that are part of the university and those that are not and feel excluded from a substantial part of the city’s civic life. I found this fascinating.

DS: Yeah, yeah. It is really helpful. In this book, you introduce biographical narrative as a part of the text. Because you are interested in counter narratives, or maybe complicated narratives of the city, how much do you think about how other people’s personal biographies engender these otherwise banal places with a deep meaning?

AS: I originally wanted the text to feature other people’s experiences, so I wrote a questionnaire and asked people with different areas of expertise to fill it out, including students from my department (the Ruskin School of Art), but their responses were generally disappointing. They were very guarded, or their reflections were kind of basic. I could have kept on at it, but I didn’t see that was the way forward, and I concluded I was as good a person as any other to narrate the city. However, and this applies to all my work, I don’t claim that the book is reality, but merely that this was my experience of Oxford, which is broadly what the quote hints at. Someone else might have a completely different understanding of that place.

DS: You referenced Border Documents a little bit ago. That project has a direct and equal interplay between text and image. As a way of getting into that, I wonder if you could explain a little bit more about the practicalities of working on the project and how it came to be.

AS: My father was born in Juárez, Mexico, on the US-Mexico border. I was also born there because he is proud of his northern roots, but I never lived there. I was raised in Mexico City. Nevertheless, we traveled there on vacation very often, which informed my experience of the US early on, as I have family on both sides of the border. Those travels were essential to learning about the unique characteristics of the border.

In the 90s, Juarez started to decline in almost every way. A substantial reason, beyond the usual corruption and trafficking of goods and illicit substances, had to do with the mismanagement of migratory waves of people from the south of Mexico trying to find jobs in the newly established maquiladoras (assembly plants) after the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This led to both an expansion of the city and a rise of shanty towns, which produced many problems, including an increase in crime (though the people living in those poor areas were its first and foremost victims). It is difficult to summarize the steep social and political decline of the city. Unfortunately, things got worse once President Calderón declared a war on drugs in 2006, which made Juárez the most violent city in the world for a few years.

Whenever I listened to my father’s stories about his youth there, it was hard not to think that things used to be better in the past, even if the city was more provincial and less developed. It was captivating to hear from him how much the city had changed in a generation, which got me thinking of compiling his stories. I thought they represented the kind of aspects of everyday life on the border that you don’t hear about when the main focus by the media is on violence and illegal migration.

DS: From a pragmatic perspective, was your father with you when you were making the photographs? Did you do that simultaneously?

AS: Yes, we traveled together. I interviewed him to determine which stories I would feature and figure out where to photograph in the city. Then, we went together to where the stories took place, which prompted him to share more details about them. It was endearing to see him remembering his past. He hadn’t seen some of these places in years because he lives in Mexico City. Some locations were easier to find than others. Sometimes, the building the story mentions wasn’t there anymore. For instance, one of the houses where he grew up is now an empty lot, but that wasn’t always the case. Some things remained.

DS: Yeah, sure. And again, all these answers touch on this idea of representation and personal experience, which now includes biography as an intertwined element. One of the things that makes Border Documents fascinating is that your photographs are not personal photographs. Your father contributes lush, evocative statements, and your photographs are relatively matter of fact. How do you think about your contribution in this case? Are you the reporter or sociologist making a representation of a thing, or is it something more in dialogue with these reflections?

AS: Just like Robert Adams, who has never seen a tree he doesn’t like, I enjoy photographing streets and the urban environment. However, not everything out there is equally interesting, so I see it as my job to create a framework, often through words, so that they can communicate ideas or feelings. That is not to say it is impossible to communicate these aspects without texts. Artists can take different kinds of pictures of the streets, such as the many Japanese photographers that have produced very gestural photography. That style is not for me because it quickly becomes abstract or about the medium itself, whereas my main concern is to depict the place in question.

Text can make emotions elicited by the urban landscape more evident, expanding the range of what the image can communicate. In other words, the photograph is not solely responsible for stirring up something in the viewer. Hopefully, the image itself can still do that, but if that is not the case, they can project something else onto the work once they have read the text. Images can communicate even more things when you pair them with other media, so language is just one way of doing this. Other people pair them with music, dance, objects, or even scents.

DS: Yeah, it is one of these forms of representation you are using to interrogate the city and biography. One of the things that jumped out at me from In A Certain Logic of Expectations is when you say,

When I tell people that the only places I have been in England are Oxford, Bath, and London, they invariably respond that I have not ‘really’ experienced this country. Interestingly, some of these same people have reacted ambivalently towards these pictures, feeling that they could have been taken anywhere. The contradiction is never apparent to them.

Taking all your work together, where is the image of the twenty-first-century city found amongst the powerful imaging and the banality?

AS: The way I approach my projects is to think about the specificities of the place I am photographing. People who talk about globalization often only consider cities like Tokyo, Paris, or New York. Sure, maybe those cities have many things in common, although it is not a coincidence that most of these things are tied to commerce and not culture, but there are many aspects in which they are different. It all depends on how you look at them. Does Mexico City look like other Latin American cities? Yes, and yet, when I take my Colombian or Peruvian friends to El Zócalo, they always say, “Oh, this is so different!”

Now that I have been to more places in the UK, I can tell you that Oxford is very similar to other cities in the UK, but only superficially. Not every town has these beautiful buildings that influence how you perceive it. It sounds so obvious, but what I’m trying to do with my work is precisely to capture the subtleties of the urban landscape rather than applying a formula that reduces places to a common denominator, like shopping at a Uniqlo store or something like that. Take, for instance, visual aspects like street signage, which may be the same within a country, except that the names of the streets sometimes tell you the history of a place. That happens quite a lot in the UK. You can learn about Oxford’s history just by researching the people that the streets are named after.

The challenge for me is whether viewers must be acquainted with these places in order to enjoy the work. Because I like learning about cities, I believe they don’t have to be familiar with a place to appreciate work about it. I have never been to Asia, but I like Peter Bialobrzeski’s Neon Tigers. So, for me, that is not an issue because I am curious, but I am aware that it doesn’t work like that for everyone.

DS: One of the things that draws me to your work is that you incrementally expand upon previous ideas by incorporating new material. You start with your photographs on their own and eventually get to two contributors presented as a unified duality. With each of those steps in between, it seems like you are adding an element to learn something new about the city, or to learn something new about yourself, or to learn about other people’s experiences of the city. Are there other things that you are experimenting with now that add something new to how you approach photography, representation, and personal narrative?

AS: The body of work I am editing now, which I made in Aberystwyth, Wales, will mix images of the city with pictures of the art school where I taught for a year and a half. Together, they create this dichotomy of my life there. This means showing places but also reflecting on what it means to study art and the interior landscape where this happens.

DS: What do you hope to accomplish by mixing images in this way?

AS: I am still working through it, but I want to explore what it means to teach art in a city with a strong national identity, in a country that is poorer than people realize. The pictures will also create a split between outside and inside, which differs from what I have done before. Unlike artists like the Bechers, who portrayed architecture or the built environment as objectively as possible, I am interested in projecting a subjective and personal dimension to the representation of a place.

DS: I look forward to seeing it.

AS: Thank you.