Alec Soth is a photographer who was born in 1969, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. Alec’s photojournalist approaches to Westernized America shows short stories of people who has been described as a ‘Geographical journey’. The Guardian critic Hannah Booth has added His work tends to focus on the “off-beat, hauntingly banal images of modern America”. Starting the theme of ‘Community’, I was inspired by Alec to capture everyday life in a significant way. Soth’s specialization of using people as a portal into their own lives entices me to do the same, and make storytelling a different to usual narrative photography.
Alec’s work has inspired me as much of it relates to family and the connection it has to certain and particular location. This fits in well with my surrounding theme of how my personal family is aimed to be connected to a location, my new house. I want to use Alec’s style as a way of approaching this connection as I feel its a clear and stylized outlook of family life which is realistic, that observes a mundane representation of life.
“My own awkwardness comforts people, I think. It’s part of the exchange.”
This quote shows Soth’s mundane placement in society as the photographers main aim it to communicate with society which does not reflect off of himself. However, aside to the normality of Alec’s personality, when taking photographs he states:
Untitled 09, Bogotá
Soth holds a continuous style of showing snippets of images which are non-chronological. This makes the viewer understand the story in a different way. Cleverly, this enables every viewer to see Soth’s story in a different light as many interpretations are then produced.
“The loneliness of travel is endemic in photography’s history for those who leave the studio and travel for their own subjects”.
Here, Soth underlines how photography can sometimes be described as a ‘restricting’ medium. Soth’s desire to travel further with his photographs in order to become deeper within the photograph. This is why many of Alec’s work is journalism based, but only shown through pictures. This sense of a ‘journey’ underlines the narrative tales of the people Alec captures.
Alec uses various different portraits and landscapes to tell stories (different types of typology). This variation is good towards his ambitious style of documentary photography, as the reader is transgressed through the different stages of this story.
In Soth’s career making photo book ‘Sleeping By The Mississippi‘, Soth illustrates his childhood growing up in Louisiana. The Mississippi River, Alec explains, had tenancy to overflow, ruining the lives of many people. Humorously and ‘without surprise’ according to Soth, families and natives went by ‘trusting luck’, regardless of the ‘levee going everywhere they go’. This determination, and fixation of remaining home in Louisiana derives the reader into understanding the love of home and family within this overall community.
Living from his imagination, Soths document style has been finalized in the words of Anne Wilkes Tucker, from the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston:
“Soth Pries open what he experiences and those whom he met and he wonders (and confirms) that the world can bear & be”.