Arturo Soto is a Mexican photographer, writer and educator. He has published the photobooks In the Heat (2018) and A Certain Logic of Expectations (2021). Soto holds a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Oxford, an MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York, an MA in Art History from University College London, and undergraduate degrees in Film and Photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design. 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, Photo-Eye, Photomonitor, Elephant, Objektiv, and ASX. He lives in Wales, where he is a Lecturer in Photography at Aberystwyth University.
Soto’s artistic practice has been markedly inspired by the work of the French writer Georges Perec, whose fragmentary and often absurd projects offer a methodology for the study of the infraordinary, the term he coined to describe the nothingness that comprises the bulk of our lives. Perec highlighted the complexity of micro-events and banal spaces, exposing the partiality and selectivity of our attention so that we question why we grant significance to certain things while overlooking others. Perec’s writings provide a fitting analogy for documentary images, which give a realistic impression of the world while connoting an authorial vision. Similarly, Soto is interested in exploring the relationship between places and states of mind through sequences of images that capture a range of values located in the urban environment, including those elicited by his affects and desires.
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