Arturo Soto

“The situation is that for some reason a text has become unacceptable yet it cannot be discarded” — Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation

The method of repurposing discarded materials — a common practice in contemporary sculpture — can be deployed in photography to question what constitutes meaningful documentary information. Pictures are never useless, as they will always contain the possibility of meaning, perhaps even more so when their original context has been rendered irrelevant. The series Sums and Remainders (2015-20) was inspired by the phenomenological ethos of Albert Renger-Patzsch’s photobook Die Welt is schön (1928), which, through its chaotic diversity, suggests that photographs possess a unique visual rhetoric that compels us to probe the aesthetic value of things.