PENUMBRA WORKSPACE PROGRAM | RESIDENT | 2026
Arturo Soto
Image © Arturo Soto. Courtesy of the artist.
“Soto’s photographs present a typology of Los Angeles’s landscape through its most chaotic and jumbled conflagrations, the urban intersection....Though Soto’s focus on landscape makes him part of a distinctly Southern Californian lineage, from the sparsely bleak topographies of Joe Deal to the serial precision of Lewis Baltz, and the pop roughness of Ed Ruscha to Catherine Opie’s banquet-camera views of freeways and mini-malls, like these it documents the seemingly mundane with care, highlighting the highly visible yet unexamined aspects of the urban vernacular.”
Arturo Soto is a Mexican photographer and writer. He has published the photobooks In the Heat (2018), A Certain Logic of Expectations (2021), and Border Documents (2025). 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 Decolonization and Diversity in Contemporary Photography, Imaginaria and the Subjective Atlas of Mexico. Soto's critical writing has been published in VII Insider, C4 Journal, Photo-Eye, The Brooklyn Rail, Objektiv, ASX, among other places. He lives in Los Angeles.
SPONSORS
This program is supported by The Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, The Joy of Giving Something, the Ruth Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council, and the Lawrence Foundation.
