In our fifth collection, Black Snow and Butter, Ari Marcopoulos renders life with unflinching intimacy, documenting subcultures and everyday moments with the eye of both insider and observer. His work shifts between motion and stillness, capturing authentic moments earned through decades of presence within the worlds he inhabits. Alongside these videos, we share photographic prints and publications that illuminate Marcopoulos’s vision.
ARI MARCOPOULOS (b. 1957, Amsterdam) is a photographer and filmmaker based in New York. Marcopoulos documents communities from within, working with immediacy and minimal intervention; his subjects exist independently of the camera, yet through his lens, their most fleeting moments endure.
Over decades, he has moved fluidly between worlds—from skateboarding and hip-hop scenes to snowboarding communities in the Swiss Alps, from artists’ studios to his own family life. Across 35mm and digital photography, video, and artist books, he registers subtle gestures and genuine interactions, finding beauty and anxiety in unguarded moments.
At various moments throughout his career, Ari Marcopoulos has photographed and filmed snowboarders as part of his larger interest in picturing dynamic and ephemeral phenomenon, from graffiti to bodies in motion. In October 2022, Marcopoulos traveled to Saas-Fee, Switzerland to work on his short film Butter. Butter documents a particularly fine run in the halfpipe by Lucas Foster, accentuating the silence when Foster is airborne in contrast with the sharp sound of the snowboard cutting into the surface of the icy pipe and rendering the athlete’s speed and agility as much a sonic as a visual experience.
Sometime after finishing Butter, Marcopoulos asked a group of snowboarders to send him their favorite clips of tricks which he used for another series of video works. In Black Snow (3.2 secs, 60 fps), Marcopoulos preserves the vertical screen ratio of the original iPhone footage of the 14-year-old Japanese snowboarder Haku Shimasaki, but presents it as a black and white negative. This transformation highlights the startlingly black chunks of snow as they burst and shatter against a bright, clear sky as Shimasaki performs a Cab Double 1080.
Spending time on Fee Glacier inspired Marcopoulos to begin photographing snowboarders and the extreme landscapes in which they perform their art. In this way, he was building upon an earlier series of works focusing on snowboarders that the artist created between 1995–2005, some of which appeared in the 2000 book Transitions and Exits.
Programming
Opening Reception
With conversation between Ari Marcopoulos and Robert Slifkin
Saturday, March 14, 2026
5–8pm
Join us for the opening of Black Snow and Butter.
Drinks by our buds Rick and Jona @latentcommons.