Alec Soth (b. 1969) is a photographer born and based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has published over twenty-five books including Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), NIAGARA (2006), Broken Manual (2010), Songbook (2015), I Know How Furiously Your Heart is Beating (2019), and A Pound of Pictures (2022). Soth has had over fifty solo exhibitions including survey shows organized by Jeu de Paume in Paris (2008), the Walker Art Center in Minnesota (2010) and Media Space in London (2015). Soth has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2013). In 2008, Soth created Little Brown Mushroom, a multi-media enterprise focused on visual storytelling. Soth is represented by Sean Kelly in New York, Weinstein Hammons Gallery in Minneapolis, Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, and Loock Galerie in Berlin, and is a member of Magnum Photos.
Soth liked the work of Diane Arbus. He travelled around the Mississippi River and made a self-printed book entitled Sleeping by the Mississippi which included both landscapes and portraits. Curators for the 2004 Whitney Biennial put him in their show, and one of his photographs entitled “Charles”, of a man in a flight suit on his roof holding two model aeroplanes, was used in their poster. Soth’s work has since been compared to that of Walker Evans and Stephen Shore. He has photographed for The New York Times Magazine, Fortune and Newsweek.
When he photographs people, Soth feels nervous at times. He said: “My own awkwardness comforts people, I think. It’s part of the exchange.” When he was on the road, he’d have notes describing the types of pictures he wanted taping to the steering wheel of his car. One list was: “beards, birdwatchers, mushroom hunters, men’s retreats, after the rain, figures from behind, suitcases, tall people (especially skinny), targets, tents, treehouses and tree lines. With people, he’ll ask their permission to photograph them, and often wait for them to get comfortable; he sometimes uses an 8×10 camera. He tries to find a “narrative arc and true storytelling” and pictures in which each picture will lead to the next one.
Sleeping by the Mississippi
Soth has been photographing different parts of the US since his first book, Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published in 2004.
Much has been written about Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi. First published in 2004, it is a landmark publication in the Magnum photographer’s career, which propelled him to international recognition and notoriety. First editions of the photobook are highly prized items today. At a talk in London in 2017, in conversation with Sean O’Hagan, Soth reflected on the work, almost 15 years on, and how he began to make what would eventually become the tightly-edited tome, Sleeping By the Mississippi. “I was a morose, introverted young man,” says Soth of his early years, identifying with a version of a Midwestern American sensibility that was “dark and lonely”. Working in a photo-processing lab on other people’s pictures throughout his early 20s, he had (almost) given up the ambition to become a famous artist, yet it was this very relaxation of his personal ambition that eventually allowed him the degree of freedom necessary to accept the influence of the American tradition of road trip photography in his own work – to stop pretending he was reinventing the wheel, to carry on the tradition and make it his own.
He began to follow the Mississippi River in his car, driving from place to place, letting himself progress towards locations he had vaguely researched and “using the river as a route to connect with people along the way.” These were the early days of the web and the development of his process ran parallel to the growth of the internet. “It was like web surfing in the real world,” he says, “it was like trying to ride a wave.”
He drove from location to location, going from one thing to another, with a list of keywords for things he was interested in taped to his steering wheel; Soth’s aim was to stop his car as soon as something caught his eye, but he found that what had captured his attention was not necessarily the stuff of pictures he wanted to make. “Often these are photo clichés, things that look like work by another photographer,” he says. He first needed to weed out these well-trodden tropes in order to find the personal, the things that would allow him to honestly carve out his own meaning and make pictures. “A miraculous time in my life,” is how Soth describes this process. He felt warmly welcomed in the region; he was allowed into the intimacy of people’s homes. Hyper-alive to the world, Soth had in fact just spent an intense month-long period with his mother-in-law, who had become very ill. He lived with her in her house as she died.
Soth made several more photographic books including Last Days of W, a book about a country “exhausted by George W. Bush’s presidency”. Soth spent the years between 2006 and 2010 exploring the idea of retreat. Using the pseudonym Lester B. Morrison, he created Broken Manual over four years (2006–2010) an underground instruction manual for those looking to escape their lives. Soth investigates the places in which people retreat to escape civilization, he photographs monks, survivalists, hermits and runaways. He concurrently produced the photo book From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America, an overview of Soth’s photography from the early 1990s to the present.
In 2010, Soth flew to the United Kingdom but despite not having applied for a work visa was allowed into the country on the understanding that if he was “caught taking photographs” he could be put in prison for two years. So he handed the camera to his young daughter who took pictures in Brighton. A 2016 photo exhibition, titled Hypnagogia, featured 30 images from Soth’s 20-year exploration of the state between wakefulness and sleep. “Described as a neurological phenomenon, one recurrently associated with creativity, a hypnagogic state is the dreamlike experience while awake that conjures vivid, sometimes realistic imagery,” Soth explained in the artist statement for the project.
A Pound of Pictures
A Pound of Pictures is a stream-of-consciousness celebration of the photographic medium, bringing together an entirely new collection of work by Alec Soth made between 2018 and 2021. Depicting a sprawling array of subjects — from Buddhist statues and birdwatchers to sun-seekers and busts of Abe Lincoln — this book reflects on the photographic desire to pin down and crystallise experience, especially as it is represented and recollected by printed images.
Throughout this eclectic sequence are the recurring presences of iconography, souvenirs and mementoes, and of the image-makers that surround us day to day. Forming a winding, ruminative road trip, Soth’s photographs are followed by his own notes and reflections in an extended afterword. ‘If the pictures in this book are about anything other than their shimmering surfaces,’ he writes, ‘they are about the process of their own making. They are about going into the ecstatically specific world and creating a connection between the ephemeral (light, time) and the physical (eyeballs, film).’
This image is from Soth’s “Sleeping by the Missisippi” project. The image was taken on film, and as a result of this has faded tones, with high amounts of blues and blacks. There are strong leading lines that lead from the outer sides of either end of the image, almost directly into the centre of the image. This image clearly uses the rule of thirds – both edges of the wooden exterior fall within or on the lines of the bottom thirds of the image, and the focal point, the bed, intersects with the right corner of the black window at the almost exact middle of the image. There is stark contrast in this image, between the bright white of the doorframe to the left, the faded white bedsheets and the outside of the windows, with the bold, harsh black of the window paine, and the legs of the bed. This area is therefore a focal point, contrasting from the faded blues and whites in the other parts of the image. There are also different shapes in this image, intersecting. For example, there is a triangle shape formed by the leading lines, but also many rectangle shapes: the windows, the pillows, and the doorframe to the left. Also this image doesn’t really provide any social context to life in the area of rural America that Alec Soth was documenting in this project, it can be seen through the someone stark and stripped down presentation of this image. This could represent issues of poverty, or a lack of opportunities in the area photographed, or just show a reality of living in rural or small communities.