“I was a really shy person, so it is really strange that I have made a life out of approaching strangers”
Alex Soth is an American Documentary photographer, well known for his extensive photographic projects featuring the mid-western United States. Soth is an extremely successful photographer who has the rare ability to sell photographs as prints for large amounts of money, as well as being able to sell copies of his photo-book in mass quantity. Soth’s work explores social documentary, specfically the sub-genre of community photography, meaning that he is very much required to work from an outsider perspective. He has stated that his biggest success within his photography is being able to shape his “photographic career out of finding chemistry with strangers”, often “loners and dreamers”
Soth was born in 1969 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. An introvert, Soth was extremely shy during childhood and adolescence. His interest in photography began through studying the worrk of portrait photographer Diane Arbus. Orginally, Soth considered himself to be a tableaux photographer – largely because he felt uncomfortable photographing people without their permission. He eventually began to become more interested in social documentary, esacially of Amercian Culture, and so extended his photography to combine photojournalism and tableaux photography.
Soth first won worldwide artist recognition in 2004 with the publication of Sleeping by Mississippi; a self printed book by Soth. The book contists of Soth documentation landscapes and interiors while road trips along the Mississippi river. In 2006 this was followed by Soth’s series ‘Niagara’, using the location Niagara falls as the case-study of the project, exploring the meaning of Niagara Falls for different people. He has since then produced two more books, Last Days of W and From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America. He has also produced commissioned work for The New York Times Magazine.
Soth’s work is included in a number of permanent collections, including those at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. He is represented by the Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis.
