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”.

As a starting point, I’ve responded to David Moore contextually. I researched past images of my family, and came across this image of my uncle, my dads brother,  in the 1980s. I felt this image related to Moore’s work as although his work is British based, you can clearly see the similarities regarding the era’s style and complexity.

From The New York Times Newspaper article: “Posing Questions of Photographic Ethics”in June 2015, it states photographers have to wear away from moral and immoral questions towards crisis’s which have been documented throughout the modern world’s history. This is evident as the times state ‘blowback’ is to come for artist Michael Camber as his latest exhibition: “Altered Images: 150 Years of Posed and Manipulated Documentary Photography”. The exhibit, a selection of well-known images that have been adjusted, staged or faked, as an indictment of some modern practices, and practitioners of photojournalism. A founder of the Bronx Documentary Centre where the show was being exhibited quotes:

“I think some people will be unhappy” and adds that people are being “called out”

purely for a reaction done founded by the fakery of originally composed images. Kamber, the owner then goes on to add:

“I’ve lost friends who put their lives on the line to get it right, and then you have people faking it”.

The New York Times have subsequently illustrated that its immoral to document fake photography when its been manipulated and edited for public fulfilment  In conjunction to this argument, a more recent article from The Times in early September of “Image of Drowned Syrian, Aylan Kurdi, 3, Brings Migrant Crisis Into Focus” shadows the lives of many immigrants wanting to travel from Syria into other European countries and even outside of Eurasia.

People who have seen the famous image have reacted to the moral decency of capturing something so helpless; taking hold of the situation by being a bystander and observer of the boy, suggesting the photographer is dictating awareness of the incidents happing in Syria or, moreover, dodging the provisional help the photographer could of done, rather than taking a photo all in all regards to the standards and ethics when documenting crucial worldwide events and society’s moral values.

Prime Ministers and other leaders across the globe where impacted through the media of Abdullah Kurdi’s sons and wife as he was interviewed in distress after the tragic outreach of photographs and documents of his dead son. David Cameron added how he was “deeply moved” by the photos of the deaths and pledged to fulfil Britain’s “moral responsibility” and French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said the images showed the “need for urgent action by Europe”.