Alec Soth
- aliciarbarron
- Feb 9, 2018
- 2 min read
Alec Soth is an American photographer, based in Minneapolis, who makes "large-scale American projects" featuring the Midwest of the USA. 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 also a member of Magnum Photos.
As Soth mentions in this interview above, it is not important to be in a big city such as New York or London to capture life and focusing in smaller places that may not seem as important can still help to describe a big picture.
Soths work also clearly links to Robert Frank and Walker Evans which also serves as inspiration for my FMP.
The book Ping Pong Conversations, Alec Soth with Francesco Zanot.
With regards to Soth i plan to use his work ,particularly Sleeping by the Missippissi, as a starting point for my FMP because of its theme of a journey. Created from a series of road trips along the Mississippi River, Sleeping by the Mississippi captures America’s iconic Midwest. Within my project, i am looking to create a scaled down and maybe more personal piece of work. Linking to Soth's idea of a journey along a river, a possibility for my project could be to travel down the main road of my hometown and document the people, objects and places that surround it to make an attempted to describe what 'Britishness' is. Like Soth, I also come from an art background which may influence my work to create a quasi-documentary work which I am open to, however I do aim for my to be definable as a documentary piece therefore there must be a issue at the heart of it.
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