Alec SothReseñas

In this beautifully produced third issue of the international art/fashion collectible Fashion Magazine, the acclaimed American photographer Alec Soth plays Editor-in-Chief, Advertising Director and sole photographic contributor--to quietly mesmerizing results. Featuring exquisite printing, unexpected gatefolds, special inks, varnishes and paper changes, this magazine-as-artist's-book-as-sociological-study-as-tongue-in-cheek-(yet-also-very-real)-advertising-vehicle contains some of the most riveting work being produced by a young photographer today. Soth explains: "While Fashion Magazine has a single photographer-author, it's still a magazine, not a book. So it doesn't follow my usual mode of slow, solitary production. It's collaboration. The ideas for the collaboration were formulated very quickly. I was approached by the folks at the Paris office of Magnum to work on this issue late last year. I immediately said yes. I was a huge fan of the previous two editions (by Martin Parr and Bruce Gilden) and was looking for an excuse to play with fashion . I often say that when I am making a portrait, I'm not 'capturing' the other person. If the photograph documents anything, it is the space between the subject and myself. Something similar is at work with Fashion Magazine. I'm not really comfortable saying I know anything about Paris or its fashion world. And I suspect that most fashionable Parisians know just as little about Minnesota. What is interesting is the space between us. My favorite example of this involves Chanel. In Paris, I photographed Karl Lagerfeld at the Grand Palais. In Minnesota, I photographed a girl with a Chanel shopping bag in front of Sally's Beauty Shop. With this magazine, I'm trying to explore the distance between those two places."
Photographer Alec Soth was born in 1969 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he continues to live and work. He is the recipient of major fellowships from the McKnight and Jerome Foundations, and was awarded the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography. His photographs are represented in major public collections including The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions worldwide. Soth's widely acclaimed first monograph, Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published in 2004, followed by Niagara and Dog Days Bogotá in 2006 and 2007 respectively. Soth is represented by Gagosian Gallery in New York and Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis. He is an associate photographer with Magnum Photos.

Alec Soth’s reputation as one of the leading lights of contemporary photographic practice is largely predicated on the books he has published. This unusual catalogue accompanies a touring exhibition which uses the four major bodies of work which Soth has published as books since 2004 as the structural basis for both a mid-career retrospective and an investigation of Soth’s prescient understanding of the various and distinct applications of photography as a tool for storytelling across diverse media. The title of the exhibition comes from Walt Whitman’s poem Song of Myself [1855] and references both the pages of his books gathered for consideration and the notion that his work is also a story about Soth himself.

Soth's meteoric rise to international acclaim began with his first book, Sleeping by the Mississippi, published by Steidl in 2004. The book has sold through numerous print runs and has long been out-of-print. It embodies not only a moment in which a new and original voice emerged with an unusual ability to transpose subtle and highly personal stories of local American life, but also marked a significant early event in the photo-book publishing boom we are currently experiencing. The success of his two subsequent volumes, Niagara [2006] and Broken Manual [2010], combined with the hugely influential exploration of self-publishing under his Little Brown Mushroom imprint, have all reinforced Soth’s position as a master of the book form. The recent success of Songbook [2015] has seen a return to the mainstream of book publishing.

This catalogue is a special object, bringing together an essay by Aaron Schuman spread across 29 large format postcards, with mini facsimile versions of Soth’s 4 books, all housed together in a luxurious printed and embossed clamshell box.

Box:
Embossed cardboard box with 4c printed paper cover and interior printed 1c. [228 mm x 223 mm]

Alec Soth‘s photobook "Looking for Love, 1996“, including his photo series of the same name, looks back to the time of the beginning, the time when everything is still open and exciting, when everything gently falls into place. It‘s the phase of the beginning, that forms the basis not only of a new love, but also of each new photographic project. It‘s a book about searching, about the curious and intuitive approach to people and their stories. About falling in love to a medium that opens insights to worlds that would otherwise stay hidden – intensive and haunting like an interminable night at the bar

“This is the closest we have to an Americans for our time... CAPOLAVORO!... already hailed critically as a classic... One of the best photo books in a lonnnnng time”

Known for his haunting portraits of solitary Americans in Sleeping by the Mississippi and Broken Manual, Alec Soth has recently turned his lens toward community life in the country. To aid in his search, Soth assumed the increasingly obsolescent role of community newspaper reporter. From 2012-2014, Soth traveled state by state while working on his self-published newspaper, The LBM Dispatch, as well as on assignment for the New York Times and others. From upstate New York to Silicon Valley, Soth attended hundreds of meetings, dances, festivals and communal gatherings in search of human interaction in an era of virtual social networks. With Songbook, Soth has stripped these pictures of their news context in order to highlight the longing for connection at their root. Fragmentary, funny and sad, Songbook is a lyrical depiction of the tension between American individualism and the desire to be united.

Alec Soth (b. 1969) is a photographer born and based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His photographs have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 2004 Whitney and Sao Paulo Biennials. In 2008, a survey exhibition of Soth’s work was exhibited at Jeu de Paume in Paris and Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. In 2010, the Walker Art Center produced a traveling survey exhibition of Soth’s work entitled From Here To There. Soth has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2013). In 2008, Soth founded his own publishing company, Little Brown Mushroom. Soth is represented by Sean Kelly in New York, Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis, Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, and is a member of Magnum Photos.

"During these last days of the administration, what is the point of protest, satire or any other sort of rabble-rousing? In assembling this convection of pictures I've made over the last eight years, I'm not really trying to accomplish much at all. But as President Bush once said. 'One of the great things about books is, sometimes there are some fantastic pictures'"

By way of follow-up to his critically acclaimed debut monograph Sleeping by the Mississippi, Alec Soth turns his eye to another iconic body of water, Niagara Falls. And as with his photographs of the Mississippi, these images are less about natural wonder than human desire. "I went to Niagara for the same reason as the honeymooners and suicide jumpers," says Soth, "the relentless thunder of the Falls just calls for big passion." The subject may be hot, but the pictures are quiet, the rigorously composed and richly detailed products of a large-format 8x10 camera. Working over the course of two years on both the American and Canadian sides of the Falls, Soth edited the results of his labors down to a tight and surprising album. He depicts newlyweds and naked lovers, motel parking lots, pawnshop wedding rings and love letters from the subjects he photographed. We read about teenage crushes, workplace affairs, heartbreak and suicide. Oscar Wilde wrote, "The sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life." Niagara brings viewers both the passion and the disappointment--a remarkable portrayal of modern love and its aftermath.

Alec Soth (born 1969, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States) is an American photographer, based in Minneapolis, who makes "large-scale American projects" featuring the midwestern United States. His photography has a cinematic feel with elements of folklore that hint at a story behind the image. New York Times art critic Hilarie M. Sheets wrote that he has made a "photographic career out of finding chemistry with strangers" and photographs "loners and dreamers". His work tends to focus on the "off-beat, hauntingly banal images of modern America" according to The Guardian art critic Hannah Booth. His work has been compared to that of Walker Evans and Stephen Shore. He is a member of Magnum Photos. Soth has had various books of his work published by major publishers as well as self-published through his own Little Brown Mushroom. His major publications are Sleeping by the Mississippi, Niagara, Broken Manual and Songbook. He has received fellowships from the McKnight and Jerome Foundations and was the recipient of the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography. His photographs are in major public and private collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Walker Art Center. His work has been exhibited widely including as part of the 2004 Whitney Biennial and a major solo exhibition at Media Space in London in 2015.

The first in a series of men’s magazines, this issue features poetry, erotic text, pictures of ex-girlfriends and a photo-story by Soth.

From February 12th through February 28th, Alec Soth and Brad Zellar were on the road in California, traveling in the Valleys of Silicon, San Joaquin, and Death for the fourth installment of The LBM Dispatch. While each of these valleys has a distinct character, all of them loom large in the country’s history and mythology of success, failure, dreams, and futility. Continuing The Dispatch’s examination of community in the 21st-century United States, Three Valleys explores the brave new worlds and pervasive virtuality of Silicon Valley, the Depression-era remnants of agricultural settlements and immigrant communities in the San Joaquin, and the other-worldly boom-and-bust landscapes of Death Valley, where the Manson Family holed up at the tail end of the 1960s.

Sleeping by the Mississippi by Alec Soth is one of the defining publications in the photobook era. First published by Steidl in 2004, it was Soth’s first book, sold through three print runs, and established him as one of the leading lights of contemporary photographic practice. This is the second printing of the MACK edition and includes two new photographs that were not included in the Steidl versions of the book. Evolving from a series of road trips along the Mississippi River, Sleeping by the Mississippi captures America’s iconic yet oft-neglected ‘third coast’. Soth’s richly descriptive, large-format colour photographs present an eclectic mix of individuals, landscapes, and interiors. Sensuous in detail and raw in subject, Sleeping by the Mississippi elicits a consistent mood of loneliness, longing, and reverie. ‘In the book’s 46 ruthlessly edited pictures’, writes Anne Wilkes Tucker in the original essay published in the book, ‘Soth alludes to illness, procreation, race, crime, learning, art, music, death, religion, redemption, politics, and cheap sex.’ Like Robert Frank’s classic The Americans, Sleeping by the Mississippi merges a documentary style with poetic sensibility. The Mississippi is less the subject of the book than its organizing structure. Not bound by a rigid concept or ideology, the series is created out of a quintessentially American spirit of wanderlust. Sixteen years since the book was first published, the artist’s lyrical view has undoubtedly acquired a nuanced significance – one in which hope, fear, desire and regret coalesce in the evocative journey along this mythic river.

‘There are other words for Soth's strategy – poetry, for one, or punk. Nothing is harder than making it look easy.‘ David O'Neill

Taking its name from a line in the Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Gray Room,” Alec Soth’s latest book is a lyrical exploration of the limitations of photographic representation. While these large-format color photographs are made all over the world, they aren’t about any particular place or population. By a process of intimate and often extended engagement, Soth’s portraits and images of his subject’s surroundings involve an enquiry into the extent to which a photographic likeness can depict more than the outer surface of an individual, and perhaps even plumb the depths of something unknowable about both the sitter and the photographer.

“After the publication of my last book about social life in America, Songbook, and a retrospective of my four, large scale American projects, Gathered Leaves, I went through a long period of rethinking my creative process. For over a year I stopped traveling and photographing people. I barely took any pictures at all.

When I returned to photography, I wanted to strip the medium down to its primary elements. Rather than trying to make some sort of epic narrative about America, I wanted to simply spend time looking at other people and, hopefully, briefly glimpse their interior life.

In order to try and access these lives, I made all of the photographs in interior spaces. While these rooms often exist in far-flung places, it’s only to emphasize that these pictures aren’t about any place in particular. Whether a picture is made in Odessa or Minneapolis, my goal was the same: to simply spend time in the presence of another beating heart.” – Alec Soth

Includes interview with Alec Soth by Hanya Yanagihara

Applicando nuovamente l'approccio usato in Sleeping by the Mississippi, Soth vaga intorno alle cascate del Niagara, meta abituale per coppie in luna di miele, chiedendo alla persone che incontra di poterle fotografare. E incontra storie che descrivono, anche nella relazione con gli esterni e gli interni dei motel della zona, un sentore cupo, solitario e disperato, accentuato dal perpetuo flusso delle cascate, perfettamente riflesso nel vestito di una sposa in una delle immagini. Soth qui usa anche il testo - lettere raccolte dalle persone che ha incontrato - in maniera molto efficace creando un secondo livello di dialogo fra immagini e parole. Senza dubbio un altro capolavoro contemporaneo, personalmente tuttavia un gradino sotto Sleeping by the Mississippi.

Un viaggio lungo il Mississippi, dal Minnesota alla Louisiana, che racconta l'America (non solo) contemporanea partendo dal letto usato in gioventù da Charles Lindbergh e mostrandone diversi altri, raccontando storie di solitudine, religione, violenza, desiderio e costruendo un affresco potentissimo. Le immagini, prese con una camera di grande formato, sono frutto di un lavoro di meticolosa attenzione, composizione e uso del colore, collocandosi fra Eggleston e Shore e facendo di Soth un maestro della contemporaneità (e di questo libro un immediato classico).

Per prudenza quattro stelle, ma siamo di fronte a Soth, la cui maestria è fuori discussione. Libro domestico, delicato, che tiene la giusta distanza dalle persone ritratte. Resta enigmatico, seppur guidato dal titolo bellissimo (da poesia di Wallace Stevens) e chiuso da una intervista che qualcosa rivela, almeno sull'approccio di Soth. Da studiare ancora, per andare verso la quinta stella.

Aperture Magazine, 247
Guest edited by the acclaimed photographer Alec Soth, Aperture's 2022 summer issue explores the dimensions and possibilities of dreams, journeys, and chance in photography.

"Sleepwalking" covers a surprising array of images and stories from the Soviet-era Czech artist Emila Medková to Sophie Calle's discovery of an abandoned Parisian hotel to Soth's own photographs from his travels in the United States. In this issue, Jesse Dorris interviews Duane Michals about luck and fate, Marina Warner explores the enduring resonance of the figure of the sleepwalker, and artists including Etienne Courtois, Maja Daniels, and Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. present surreal and imaginative new series. The Summer 2022 issue also introduces The PhotoBook Review, a new section for lively engagement with photobooks, featuring reviews of recent titles by Nona Faustine, Samuel Fosso, Oscar Monzon, and others.

From October 20th through November 5th, Alec Soth and Brad Zellar will be on the road in Michigan, producing an election season version of the LBM Dispatch in one of the country’s most diverse and politically fascinating states. The trip –a rambling search for the state of the union in towns all over Michigan– will take them across the Upper Peninsula to the Mackinac Straits, and then downstate through the enormous territory of the Lower Peninsula, including stops in Saginaw, Flint, Detroit, Ann Arbor, Kalamazoo, and Grand Rapids.

Following on from the bestselling box set ‘Gathered Leaves’, published to accompany Alec Soth’s touring exhibition which opened in London in 2015, this unique publication brings together five of Soth’s major books in their entirety in a single, compact, and densely detailed volume. Across more than 700 pages of newsprint, Soth updates and reimagines the original version of Gathered Leaves by reproducing every spread from these five books with detailed annotations in the form of notes, text extracts, and additional photographs. This new roadmap through Soth’s oeuvre also includes a new introduction by the artist.
Soth’s meteoric rise to international acclaim began with his first book, Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), an elegiac road trip down the ‘third coast’ of the United States, which has since has sold through numerous print runs and is widely acknowledged as a classic. The success of his subsequent volumes Niagara (2006), Broken Manual (2010), and Songbook (2015) elaborated Soth’s lyrical but unflinching approach and reinforced his position as a master of the book form. His most recent work, A Pound of Pictures (2022), brings a new, poetic perspective to the idiosyncrasies of American life and the practice of image-making, broached once again through Soth’s now-distinctive road trip format.
This publication accompanies a solo exhibition at Versicherungskammer Kulturstiftung in Munich, May 2022 and at The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama, Japan, June 2022.

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, of souvenirs and mementos, 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).’

Each book contains five randomised replica vernacular photographs loosely inserted within the pages.

Coincides with solo exhibitions at Sean Kelly Gallery, New York (opening 13 January), Weinstein Hammons Gallery, Minneapolis (28 January), and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco (3 February).


Embossed linen hardcover with front and back tip-in
Three different papers, including a marbled Japanese stock and five randomised replica vernacular photographs
25.3 x 31 cm, 156 pages

A meditation on John Keats Rome pale men beautiful women and pineapples by the photographer Alec Soth. This large oversized book is limited to 500 copies. English edition .Text by Francesco Zanot design Nicola Veccia Scavalli

In January 2020, Alec Soth received a letter from Chris Fausto Cabrera, an inmate of the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Rush City, in which he asked the photographer to engage in a dialogue. This sparked an expansive and insightful correspondence over the following nine months which, set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter Movement and growing unrest, reaches to the heart of contemporary America. In amongst their exchanges of personal histories and shared influences – from Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man and André 3000, to Robert Frank’s The Americans and Rilke’s 'Letters to a Young Poet' – developed a searing investigation of the redemptive power of art and the imagination, justice and accountability, life inside America’s prisons, and the astonishing capacity of empathy and curiosity to bring two people together.

Inspired by The Winnebago Workshop, Alec selected photographs of teens from his archive. 19 Teens includes pictures from notable bodies of work like Niagara and Last Days of W along with never before seen pictures.