Ari Marcopoulos, the Amsterdam born, New York based photographer, has made a career out of documenting street culture around the world. His new book, Ari Marcopoulos: Directory (Rizzoli New York, $65) travels the familiar terrain of skinny adolescent bodies, skateboards, and graffiti. Speaking of which, there are so many graffiti shots in the phonebook-sized tome, that it makes even me, a seasoned New Yorker comfortable with street culture, wish we had a better sanitation department.
     The book is a limited run of 2,000 copies. Each copy comes with a print (as in from a computer printer), but each is hand-signed by the photographer. The tome includes 1,200 of Marcopoulos’ recent photographs, some of which are fantastic – especially those that show the unadorned intimacy of teenagehood. Still, half way in you may get bogged down and wish for a better editing job. I don’t know what the magic number of pages is, but I don’t like it when a book becomes an exercise in page-turning.
     The unexpected treat of the book is Neville Wakefield’s writing that provides commentary on some photos. He has a keen eye and a way with words. To wit, from a paragraph about an admittedly arresting photo of a wave breaking against the Hokkaido seafront, “Only the railing holds us back from its seething, roiling energy, from the suicidal beauty that is the urge to submit to such pounding violence.” I’ll drink to that.