Border Documents: A Conversation with Arturo Soto

Border Documents is a new photobook from Arturo Soto, a photographer, writer and educator. It is "a personal archive of ordinary events that reveals how emotions become attached to public spaces." Having grown 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, Soto compiled and narratively shaped his father’s memories, then photographed the sites where they occurred. In this conversation: the concept behind the book; the structure of the narrative; Georges Perec and the infra-ordinary; biography and personal experience; the new book in relation to Soto's other work; growing up, studying, working, and traveling in places from Mexico City to Oxford to Panama to Los Angeles; further reading on Ciudad Juárez and El Paso; and much more!A few other interesting books about Juárez:Edmond Baudoin and Jean-Marc Troubet, Viva la Vida: Los sueños en Ciudad Juárez (Mexico City: Sexto Piso, 2011)Charles Bowden, et al, Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future (New York: Aperture, 1998)Julián Cardona, Stardust: Memories of the Calle Mariscal (El Paso: Rubin Center for the Visual Arts), 2014Ricardo Ainslie, The Fight to Save Juárez: Life in the Heart of Mexico’s Drug War (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013) Alfredo Corchado, Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter’s Journey through a Country’s Descent into the Darkness (New York: Penguin, 2013)

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