FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

The Psychedelic Booby Trap Issue

Literary

Ari Marcopoulos is the godfather of Xeroxed photozines. This is not a backhanded compliment. When you consider the amount of quality work Ari has put out over the years, you’ll see what we mean.

Photos by Ari Marcopoulos

Ari Marcopoulos is the godfather of Xeroxed photozines. This is not a backhanded compliment. When you consider the amount of quality work Ari has put out over the years, you’ll see what we mean. Since moving to New York from Holland in 1979, Ari, who is 53, has risen from poorly paid beginnings to become the widely published and commissioned photographic powerhouse that he is today. His latest venture is a book entitled Directory, which, as the name suggests, is a weighty tome designed to resemble a phonebook, only this one contains 1,200 of Ari’s photographs. Naturally, we had to find out more.  Vice: Hello Ari. What were you shooting pictures of when you started out?
Ari Marcopoulos: I first got into photography when I was a kid. My dad had just got home from a trip to Japan and he brought back an Asahi Spotmatic camera which he gave to me. I loved it so much. I took a bunch of pictures at a local racing car track and I also have a bunch of my girlfriend of the time. I would mostly roam around town and shoot pictures of anything I found interesting. So you were just getting to know the camera?
Yeah, exactly. I was also learning to develop films and photographs in a darkroom which was set up in the basement of my parents’ house. The whole process seemed magical to me. Did you have growing ambitions to turn this hobby into a career?
Not really, but it was definitely a growing thought as I progressed. Career is a big word, though. I wasn’t really thinking “career” as such. My first real project was portraits of musicians and artists, which turned into being my first book. You made that after you had arrived in New York?
Yeah. Well, I moved to New York in 1979 from Holland. I didn’t really know much about New York but I loved skyscrapers and Converse All Stars, so it seemed like the right move for me. I wanted to stay for six months, try to work and go back home, but I’m still here 30 years later. It was cool that it worked out so well, there was a good energy around. It was a lot rawer then in comparison to today. People romanticise the past too much, especially New York in the 80s. It was good then, but it’s still good in its own way now. Weren’t you Andy Warhol’s assistant for a while?
Well, I printed his black and white photographs. It really wasn’t a big thing. People tend to bring it up a lot, but to me, it was just a job with extremely low pay. I was really broke, so I did that to make money to live. Most of the time I would just roam around taking photos as I didn’t really have much else to do. A lot of your photography seems quite interested in inequality of various sorts, like race and law. Is that something you actively try to photograph?
That sort of thing was right in front of me; racism is alive and well. It’s undeniable and you see it everywhere. It is something that I deliberately try to show in parts of my work, but I don’t think I actively seek it out. It was just an observation. It was, however, a starting point for my interest in skateboarding. Things like that didn’t have a role within their community, they were separate. They couldn’t care less where you came from, what colour you were or what you believed in. Their common interest overruled anything like that. How did you become friendly with the New York skaters? From what I hear, they weren’t the most inviting bunch.
I saw them under the Brooklyn Bridge one day, and a friend of mine, Dave Aron, introduced me to Jeff Pang. The first day I spent hanging out with Jeff and Harold Hunter and we instantly got on. Did they mind you taking photos of them?
No, not at all. We made instant friends, Nescafé-style. I think one of my talents is being able to get along with people that way. I am naturally inquisitive. How did your new book come about?
It’s an idea I’ve had for years; it was just a question of finding a way to do it. After it being a long time in the planning stages, Rizzoli agreed to publish it, but it wasn’t easy as it’s obviously not what you would call a classic Rizzoli book. What was their reaction to the initial idea to produce it like a phone book?
The editors I work with there got it straight away and were into the idea. The only problem was that Rizzoli is a big company with many people to convince that the book was a good idea, especially as this was right around the time that the US economy had completely tanked. Luckily it all played out quite smoothly, everyone got it and wanted to do it. It was a long process, though. It was an idea I had years ago and then it was about a year of work to get it to being ready to release. I scanned and photocopied everything myself. What do you like about photocopying so much?
It makes book-making easy. It’s the main reason I was able to make these things in the beginning. I am also used to making book edits pre the digital revolution; however it’s not purely from a practical standpoint and isn’t the only kind of printing technique I use. So what was the idea behind printing it as a phone book directory?
Directory only refers to the format and not so much the content. The idea of the book is to be an approximation of the visual noise we are bombarded with daily. It’s all the things you see and cannot process; all the magazines, billboards and advertising you come into contact with among pictures of people I have come across on my journeys in New York. So this is sort of a statement against that?
It’s not something that I think is bad, so I’m not really venting. It’s the soundtrack to your life. It’s not planned or particularly composed. Directory is out now, published by Nieves/Rizzoli. More at Nieves.ch.