The next Artist You Need To Know is Alec Soth.
Soth is an American photographer who lives and works in Minneapolis. His artistic focus is primarily on “large-scale American projects” that are set in the midwestern United States, offering images of places and people that coalesce into larger narratives. New York Times critic Hilarie M. Sheets describes Soth’s aesthetic as making a “photographic career out of finding chemistry with strangers” often documenting “loners and dreamers”. Others have described Soth’s vision as offering “off-beat, hauntingly banal images of modern America.”
His photographs have a documentary quality that is reminiscent – in the history of American photography – of Walker Evans, with the same clear eye and his straddling of social documentary and portraiture.
“For me, photography is as much about the way I respond to the subject as it is about the subject itself.”
The images below are from the series Niagara : more of this body of work can be seen here.
He was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota (USA) in 1969 and studied at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. An early influence on his aesthetic was the work of Diane Arbus (this can be seen in how his subjects present themselves almost without a consideration or trepidation for the eyes of others, but Soth’s gaze is more empathetic, more reminiscent of previously featured Artist You Need To Know Mary Ellen Mark). Over his career, he’s been compared to the aforementioned Walker Evans but also to Stephen Shore.
“Concerned with the mythologies and oddities that proliferate America’s disconnected communities, Soth has an instinct for the relationship between narrative and metaphor. His clarity of voice has drawn many comparisons to literature, but he believes photography to be more fragmented.”
His own words about his approach to his photographs : “It’s more like poetry than writing a novel.”
Below are a selection of images from Soth’s series Sleeping by the Mississippi : more of that body of work can be seen here.
Soth is a member of Magnum Photos and has worked with The New York Times Magazine, Fortune and Newsweek.
Considering the storytelling nature of his works, it’s unsurprising that Soth has produced a number of impressive books of his work. These are books that are both self published (through his own company Little Brown Mushroom) but also working with major publishers. Notable collections of his work include Sleeping by the Mississippi, Niagara, Broken Manual, Songbook, I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating, and A Pound of Pictures.
Soth has been awarded fellowships from the McKnight and Jerome Foundations, won the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography, and in 2021 received an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society. His artworks can be found in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Walker Art Center.
The photographs below are from Soth’s book / series titled Last Days of W which a visual representation (and exploration) of “a country “exhausted by George W. Bush’s presidency”.” (from here)
You can see more of this series here.
Soth’s exhibition record is also impressive (both in terms of showing in the United States but also internationally). He participated in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and has had solo exhibitions at Gagosian Gallery (NYC, 2006), Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown, MA, 2009 – 2010), High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA, 2010 – 2011), Triennale di Milano (Milan, Italy, 2010), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN, 2012), Multimedia Art Museum (Moscow, 2012), Media Space (London, UK, 2015), The Finnish Museum of Photography (Helsinki, 2016 – 17), The Museum of Modern Art (Kamakura & Hayama, Japan, 2022) and Kunst Haus Wien (Vienna, 2020).
Soth is represented by Sean Kelly in New York, Weinstein Hammons Gallery in Minneapolis, Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco and Loock Galerie in Berlin.
The artist created Little Brown Mushroom in 2008 which is a “a multi-media enterprise focused on visual storytelling” that has facilitated work by a number of artists.
“I fell in love with the process of taking pictures, with wandering around finding things. To me it feels like a kind of performance. The picture is a document of that performance.”
The images below are from Soth’s series titled Paris / Minnesota : more of that body of work can be seen here.
More of Alec Soth’s work can be enjoyed here and much more about his life and career can be learned here.