Best photo books by American documentarian Alec Soth
Alec Soth has his first major UK exhibition, Gathered Leaves, at the Science Museum, London, until March 28, 2016. Here are a selection of game-changing books by a man who roams the backwaters of America.
Sleeping By the Mississippi
For this project, inspired by Huckleberry Finn, Soth explored hidden pockets of the Midwest – from pentecostal churches and Angola State prison to the boyhood home of Johnny Cash – leaving himself open to unplanned encounters.
Niagra
Driving up to Niagara Falls, Alec’s “second album” unravelled a place famous for suicide and new love. “There’s this intensity of emotion that swirls around the Falls,” he says. Shooting cheap motels, newly-weds and honeymooner nudes, and inspired by Marilyn Monroe’s Niagara, Alec tried to access the dark contradictions of hope and heartache.
Broken Manual
Ducking below the radar for Broken Manual, Soth went into the wild in search of hermits, survivalists and monastic outsiders. “I was making a manual for men who want to run away from life,” he says, flipping through stark images that marked a conceptual departure, intertwined with diagrams that make no sense. “The idea of the manual is that it’s broken – it doesn’t work.” Behold a treescape that looks ordinary and mundane; it’s the view that Theodore John Kaczynski, the ‘Unabomber’, would have taken in while making his homemade bombs. “I became more interested in that – the idea of the picture, rather than the picture itself.”
Songbook
A scrapbook of stories that explore community in the age of virtual interactions. Texan cheerleaders, ravers in New York, solemn solitary figures – the images Alec captured spoke of a modern malaise; our desire to be individuals and part of something all at once. “It’s about nostalgia, a longing for the past, as well as an anxiety for the future,” says Alec, who came to see the images as his Great American Songbook, a collection of songs evocative of another time.
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