Interview

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Dutch photographer Ari Marcopoulos moved to New York in 1980 in his early twenties and wasted no time in becoming one of the key artistic documentarians of American culture for the next three decades. His work doesn’t follow mainstream enthusiasms. Rather, Marcopoulos’s photographs have routinely—and sometimes at great risk to the man—slipped into the subversive, hardtoreach pockets of American life, from the burgeoning hiphop and downtown art scenes of New York in the 1980s to the nomadic snowboard circuit of the 1990s and even the closertohand studies that Marcopoulos has made of his own family in Northern California throughout the ’00s. The 52yearold Marcopoulos is an inimitable artist who has as much charm and personality as he does the rare ability to see a jarring photograph in places the rest of us might overlook. This fall, he is the subject of a midcareer survey—“Within Arm’s Reach,” at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum—which will include everything from early blackandwhite street shots to his latest videos, such as one filmed earlier this year in Detroit of two young kids making beats. Here, Marcopoulos talks to his friend the Los Angeles–based painter Dave Muller about how he got into photography and how he almost got himself killed pretending to know how to snowboard.

DAVE MULLER: You’re in New York right now. How’s the weather?

ARI MARCOPOULOS: It’s gray, which for me is ideal. I love flat light. It’s a good day for taking pictures.

MULLER: Do you remember the weather when you first moved to New York?

MARCOPOULOS: No, because something way more traumatic happened right after I arrived.

MULLER: What?

MARCOPOULOS: When I woke up the next morning, there was the headline that John Lennon had been shot and killed.

MULLER: It was December 1980. I remember being in junior high school and they told us at lunchtime.

MARCOPOULOS: In New York, unlike Holland, there are newspaper stands on every corner. That was a big headline all over the city. So the weather those days sort of escapes me . . .

MULLER: Why did you move to New York in the first place?

MARCOPOULOS: Because, in Holland, things were pretty stale for me. Even though there were a lot of good influences and a certain openness to music and art and literature, I just wanted to go somewhere less familiar—somewhere bigger. Holland is a fairly small country, and in a weird way, somewhat conservative. That might surprise people because it is a very tolerant place, but it’s also a somewhat Calvinist country. There isn’t much flexibility in changing people’s perspectives. I was living in a suburb of Amsterdam, so I could have moved to Amsterdam, or Paris, or London . . . I ended up in New York because it was far more attractive to me. Weirdly enough, one reason was because I was interested in sports like basketball and baseball. I had visited New York before, at age 12, and I loved the big buildings and the swarms of people. At 23, I decided to try it. I was going to go for six months, and I ended up living there for 18 years before I moved to California, so I am living the American Dream.