Ari Marcopoulos’s new book Denied captures the artist’s distinctive vison of photography, one that is disarmingly intimate and spontaneous and ultimately grounded in an almost cinematic understanding of the way images accumulate significance when juxtaposed alongside one another. A diaristic record of work, travel, and artistic collaboration, the book, like all of Marcopoulos’s work, bears witness to the present moment we are currently living through and its inescapable relationship to other time and places. On one level Denied chronicles a trip from New York with a stopover in London to Athens, a place Marcopoulos spent a lot of his childhood vacations, staying with relatives. His uncle would take him to Olympiakos games, when the stadium resembled an ancient Greek stadium with instead of marble a concrete stepped arena, since long replaced by a modern stadium with a well-maintained green field instead of the brown dirt pitch of olden days. Marcopoulos’s book summons memories of these two states of Athens, where now affluence is hidden in a few neighborhoods while the rest of the city crumbles.
