Five years in the making, A Certain Logic of Expectations is a surprising, intriguing photo narrative of a well-known university-dominated city, created by Mexican photographer Arturo Soto.
Soto studied at Oxford as a doctoral student, traversing the city incognito, capturing the quirkiness of British suburbia, a counter-narrative to the tourism blurbs that often quote Victorian poet Matthew Arnold’s line that Oxford is a city of ‘Dreaming Spires’.
As he writes: “Photographers can either carry their cameras at all times or lament the pictures they missed. Undergraduates become walking tourist attractions. Visitors love to take pictures with them when they wear their ‘subfusc’ and a carnation on their lapel on exam days, or when they get trashed with foam, confetti, and prosecco at the end of Trinity term. The University’s guidelines stipulate that students have to live within twenty-five miles from Carfax Tower. The rule is rarely enforced with doctoral students, many of whom rather keep their cosmopolitan London lives. Some even commute from Amsterdam, Berlin, or Zurich just for the graduate seminars. They are usually unimpressed by the quality of coffee here and return to their havens as soon as possible.”
Walking Writers Salons are hour-long events in which you will get to meet a Walking Writer and learn from them how they weave writing and walking, and how they interpret their surroundings. Each Salon will include a discussion with the author, inviting questions from the audience, and may include a multiple choice quiz or other amusing challenge, in which a winner will receive a prize.
