Impala

A photobook by the Amsterdam-born, New York-based photographer Ari Marcopoulos, Impala takes its title from the undercover police cars the artist repeatedly encountered around Flatbush, his Brooklyn neighborhood.

Marcopoulos photographed the unmarked Crown Victorias and Chevy Impalas from the side whenever he spotted them, deliberately avoiding high or low angles or any added interpretation; through repetition, he has said, the car loses its specific significance and becomes an outline, a shape, a repeated form that can register as authority or its misuse depending on context. Those pictures are interspersed with local pickup basketball games and street photographs made along his everyday walking loop through the neighborhood. The book was published by the independent Paris imprint Red Lebanese in 2014 as an oblong, risograph-printed softcover, numbered and limited to 300 copies.

Marcopoulos has published well over 200 books and limited-edition zines over his career, working in a fast, diaristic mode across skateboarding, hip-hop, and street subjects since the 1980s. Impala sits within that prolific self-published output, a small, direct record of one recurring observation from his own block.