Alec Soth

"The loneliness of travel is endemic in photography's history for those who leave the studio and travel in search of their subjects. Soth experienced it and recognized it in others. Rather than reject or ignore it, he sought it out, transforming it to empathy. It is all too easy to aim a camera, which can be harsh and unforgiving. When viewing a maquette of Soth's book, National Public Radio commentator Andrei Codrescu recognized Soth's piercing 'eye' and he wrote to Soth that he had woken his subjects just long enough to reveal 'the immemorial, often dreamless, sometimes hopelessly trashy quality of their sleep, then let them sink back into the mud of their impecunious marginality.'"
Anne Wilkes Tucker in Alec Soth: Sleeping By The Mississippi

MONOGRAPHS & CATALOGS

From Here to There: Alec Soth's America Edited by Siri Engberg. Interview by Bartholomew Ryan. Text by Geoff Dyer, Barry Schwabsky, Britt Salvesen, Siri Engberg, August Kleinzahler. From Here to There: Alec Soth's America is the first exhibition catalogue to feature the full spectrum of the work of Alec Soth, one of the most interesting voices in contemporary
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WALKER ART CENTER
ISBN: 9780935640960
$60.00 | Awaiting stock

Fashion Magazine by Alec Soth Interviews by Carlo Ducci, Marta Gili, Karl Lagerfeld, Pamela Golbin, Eric Olson, Alec Soth, Franca Sozzani. 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
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MAGNUM PHOTOS
ISBN: 9782952410212
$45.00 | Not available

John Gossage & Alec Soth: The Auckland Project In the Spring of 2009, John Gossage and Alec Soth were invited to photograph in Auckland, New Zealand. For both, it was a trip of departures. Gossage has been working in
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RADIUS BOOKS
ISBN: 9781934435267
$55.00 | Not available

Alec Soth

Featured image is reproduced from Alec Soth's Walker Art Center retrospective catalogue, From Here to There: Alec Soth's America, in which essayist Siri Engberg writes, "Alec Soth is an artist who has the patience, curiosity, and tenacity to uncover stories in his work, but also the restraint to not tell them fully. While his images share a sensibility of finding the lyrical in the everyday, his is not the street photography of Walker Evans or Garry Winogrand. The notion of Henri Cartier-Bresson's 'decisive moment,' of an image spontaneously captured, is elusive in these pictures. Like slow food--locally sourced, prepared, and finally savoured, they come to be through a process of searching, seeing something, stopping to look, and finally making a purposeful choice: to approach a person, cross a threshold, climb a fence. Once there, the 8-by-10-inch view camera is set up, the photographer disappears beneath the dark cloth, the real looking begins, and the image is found on the ground glass, like a miniature paining. Perhaps ten minutes later, the shutter clicks."

John Gossage & Alec Soth: The Auckland Project

Published by Radius Books

In the Spring of 2009, John Gossage and Alec Soth were invited to photograph in Auckland, New Zealand. For both, it was a trip of departures. Gossage has been working in black and white for over 40 years, and this trip yielded one of the first bodies of work he had ever produced in color. Soth's work with the 8x10 view camera has inspired an entire generation of his contemporaries, and leaving it behind was key to approaching the world from a fresh visual perspective. The results represent a major shift of vision for these two vastly important American photographers. This publication represents the culmination of that trip. Both the concept and the content of the book have been driven by the uniqueness of the "collaboration" and the primacy of the book to the artistic practice of both Soth and Gossage. Essentially two books in one, The Auckland Project showcases a playful attention to materials and presentation that marks all Radius Books projects. Unlike 2007's Obvious & Ordinary, in which Martin Parr (in his signature color) and John Gossage (using black and white) published the results of a road-trip across the American South, this volume presents the two photographers' work separately, creatively combined through the device of the book and its housing.

From Here to There: Alec Soth's America

Edited by Siri Engberg. Interview by Bartholomew Ryan. Text by Geoff Dyer, Barry Schwabsky, Britt Salvesen, Siri Engberg, August Kleinzahler.
Published by Walker Art Center

From Here to There: Alec Soth's America is the first exhibition catalogue to feature the full spectrum of the work of Alec Soth, one of the most interesting voices in contemporary photography, whose compelling images of everyday America form powerful narrative vignettes. Featuring more than 100 of the artist's photographs made over the past 15 years, the book includes new critical essays by exhibition curator Siri Engberg, curator and art historian Britt Salvesen and critic Barry Schwabsky, which offer context on the artist's working process, the photo-historical tradition behind his practice and reflections on his latest series of works. Novelist Geoff Dyer's "Riverrun"--a meditation on Soth's series Sleeping by the Mississippi--and August Kleinzahler's poem "Sleeping It Off in Rapid City" contribute to the thoughtful exploration of this body of work. Also included in the publication is a 48-page artist's book by Soth titled The Loneliest Man in Missouri, a photographic essay with short, diaristic texts capturing the banality and ennui of middle America's suburban fringes, with their corporate office parks, strip clubs and chain restaurants. This full-color publication includes a complete exhibition history, bibliography and interview with the artist by Bartholomew Ryan.
Alec Soth was born in 1969 and raised in Minnesota, where he continues to live and work. He has received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation (1999, 2004) and Jerome Foundation (2001), was the recipient of the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography and was short-listed for the highly prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. His first monograph, Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published in 2004 to critical acclaim. Since then Soth has published Niagara (2006), Fashion Magazine (2007), Dog Days, Bogotá (2007) and The Last Days of W (2008). He is a member of Magnum Photos.

Fashion Magazine by Alec Soth

Interviews by Carlo Ducci, Marta Gili, Karl Lagerfeld, Pamela Golbin, Eric Olson, Alec Soth, Franca Sozzani.
Published by Magnum Photos

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.