“The history of mankind is rife with love producing illogical and oddball behaviour. Alec Soth’s newest book Looking for Love, 1996 is, in its way, about the search for love guided by the heart and the search of love guided by the eye.”
Jeffery Ladd, TIME INC. Network
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“Love makes people do strange things states Soth. The history of mankind is rife with love producing illogical and oddball behavior. When it comes to photography, falling in love with the medium is hardly an exception.”
For example, Jeffery Ladd from TIME INC. Network states that someone as painfully shy like Soth might find themselves impulsively photographing “strangers” without asking for permission. Or, they instinctively photograph something without any ability to later explain why. Alec Soth’s book “Looking for Love” (1996) is initially about both— the search for love guided by the heart and the search of love guided by the eye.
In his brief introduction to the work Soth describes that time as one of working a “miserable job” (printing photos at a large commercial lab) and retreating to a bar to be comforted by “the solitude I found among strangers.” He began to concentrate on his own pictures, slyly using the lab to make prints which he smuggled, concealed under his jeans, out to his car. He writes of imagining one day “a stranger would fall in love with me” – a mantra or a statement he goes by when composing his images.
The first photographs of couples we encounter in Looking for Love cling possessively to their partners and leer at Soth’s camera as if to ask, “this is mine, where is yours?” While his journey takes us through the outside landscape and various social gatherings—the aforementioned bar; a convention hall that seems to bridge religion, spirituality and dating under one roof; poker games; singles parties; high school proms—we can sense as a reader, a young photographer eager to hone his photographic instincts for metaphor and craving the fruits of collaboration between artist, medium and world.
A photo of a flirtatious blonde cheerleader sits on the opposite page of a lone, slightly gothic teen outside a music club. The prom king and queen stand proudly before an auditorium empty but for a few hidden background observers and a basketball court scoreboard. An older man sits phone to ear at a ‘Psychic Friends Network’ booth while a quaffed blonde with a #1 ribbon pinned to her lapel passes by paying no mind. Alongside the underlying melancholy of some of these pictures is also the excitement of a photographer discovering their talent and seeing an affirmation of life stilled in photographs.
That affirmation makes the parting photograph all the more important. In it we see Soth himself sitting sprawl-legged in a rental tuxedo as if his own prom has just ended. Perhaps it had. I hope the love he may have found, lasts. I thought it was very important to include in my research Soth’s dominating work “Looking For Love” (1996).Soth toys with the idea of teenage sexual desires. ‘Love’ for teenagers stereotypically demises to that of little passion and loss of innocence, yet with the combination of images surrounding this idea of love as a perspective but also an ownership, allows the reader to want to crave it themselves.
