Ari Marcopoulos’s personal library reflects kinetic engagements with subcultures of the world that connect to his own wide-ranging work. “Already, look, we’re surrounded by them,” Marcopoulos, a photographer and filmmaker, said during a recent visit at his Brooklyn home, where a capacious, free-flowing arrangement of books lines the walls of an upstairs landing. More than eighty boxes were packed into his studio for an upcoming move. Marcopoulos has published some two hundred books and zines of his own (Zines, a collection of the latter, was published in 2023 by Aperture). He is refreshingly unconcerned about the preciousness of the books and magazines he collects. With equal admiration, he cited a rare, expensive edition of Yutaka Takanashi’s (, 1974) bought in Japan; a notebook by the filmmaker Pedro Costa, fascinating though “honestly, badly printed and shittily made,” he tells me; and a vintage that his partner, Kara Walker, gave him—the dynamic design of its cover, he explained, featuring Wilt Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, struck him when he first saw
