Arturo Soto grew up listening to his father’s stories about his youth in the twin cities of Juárez (Mexico) and El Paso (USA), fascinated by how much things had changed in just a generation. Over time, he compiled and narratively shaped his father’s memories, then photographed the sites where they occurred. Border Documents is a personal archive of ordinary events that reveals how emotions become attached to public spaces. Most importantly, the book stands apart from the reductive media coverage of the border that focuses solely on the violence caused by drug trafficking, illegal migration, and corruption. The different temporalities expressed through the mediums of photography and writing produce a vivid account of a territory that plays a vital role in global trade. Oscillating between the personal and the political, Border Documents reminds us, as the critic Edward Soja once remarked, that biographies are geographies as much as they are histories. Arturo Soto is a Mexican photographer and writer living in Los Angeles. Soto holds a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Oxford, and graduate degrees from the School of Visual Arts and University College London. He curated the exhibition Foreign Correspondence at the Architectural Association and participated in the first edition of Forecast Platform at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. His work has been exhibited internationally and is included in the books Imaginaria and the Subjective Atlas of Mexico. Soto’s critical writing has been published in VII Insider, C4 Journal, and Photo-Eye, among other places.
