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.

Songbook

SOTH, Alec

MACK BOOKS

Gathered Leaves Postcards consists of a luxurious 4C printed box containing 28 postcards of seminal images from the four major bodies of work which Alec Soth has published as books since 2004, combined with a booklet containing illustrated text by Aaron Schuman and Kate Bush.

Postcards

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 editions, and established him as one of the leading lights of contemporary photographic practice. This MACK edition launches to coincide with the first exhibition in London dedicated to the series at Beetles+Huxley gallery, and includes two new photographs that were not included in the previous 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. Thirteen 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.

Sleeping by the Mississippi

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Dans le prolongement de sa première monographie acclamée par la critique Sleeping by the Mississippi, Alec Soth a tourné son regard vers un autre plan d'eau emblématique, les chutes du Niagara. Comme pour ses photographies du Mississippi, les images de Niagara par Soth sont moins une question d’émerveillement naturel que de désir humain. «Je suis allé à Niagara pour la même raison que les jeunes mariés et les suicidaires», explique Soth, «le tonnerre incessant des chutes appelle juste une grande passion.» Travaillant pendant deux ans sur les côtés américain et canadien des chutes à l'aide d'un appareil photo grand format 8x10, les photographies sont rigoureusement composées et richement détaillées. Soth représente des jeunes mariés et des amoureux nus, des parkings de motel et des alliances de prêteur sur gages. Tout au long du livre, Soth a entrecoupé un certain nombre de lettres d'amour des sujets qu'il a photographiés. Nous lisons des histoires d'écrasements d'adolescents, d'affaires au travail, de chagrin et de suicide. Oscar Wilde a écrit à propos des chutes: «La vue de la magnifique cascade doit être l'une des déceptions les plus anciennes, sinon les plus vives, de la vie conjugale américaine.» À Soth’s Niagara, nous voyons à la fois la passion et la déception. Ses images sont une représentation remarquable de l’amour moderne et de ses conséquences.

Niagara

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.

I Know How Furiously Your Heart is Beating

Individual Artists

Advice for Young Artists

After completing the work for his first book, Sleeping by the Mississippi, in 2002, Alec Soth traveled with his wife to Bogotá, Colombia, to adopt a baby girl. The baby's birth mother had given the new parents a book filled with letters, pictures and poems for their daughter. "I hope that the hardness of the world will not hurt your sensitivity," she wrote. "When I think about you I hope that your life is full of beautiful things." While the courts processed the adoption paperwork, and with these words as a mission statement, Soth set about making his own book for his daughter. Soth writes, "In photographing the city of her birth, I hope I've described some of the beauty in this hard place." This beauty makes itself apparent through ramshackle architecture, the companionship of animals and the perseverance of the human spirit. But Soth's photographs also transcend the simple description of beauty, roaming through a cast of strays, tough souls and small hints of hope.

Dog Days Bogota

Steidl

Created over four years (2006-2010), Alec Soth's newest book represents a significant departure from his three previous Steidl publications. Entitled Broken Manual, Soth investigates the places in which people retreat to escape civilization. Soth photographs monks, survivalists, hermits and runaways, but this isn't a conventional documentary book on life "off the grid." Instead, working with the writer Lester B. Morrison, the authors have created an underground instruction manual for those looking to escape their lives.

Broken Manual: Alec Soth

Photography & Video

This photobook 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.

Alec Soth - Looking for Love, 1996

Kominek Books

The acronym "PIGS" is a media-coined term referring to the European Union’s economically weakest countries--Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. Carlos Spottorno’s The Pigs is a tragicomic vision of these countries’ stereotypes, utilizing the format of the influential magazine The Economist.

Carlos Spottorno: The Pigs

RM/PHREE

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Books by SOTH, Alec