Alec Soth

From Earthworks to Photography

At college, Soth initially concentrated on temporary outdoor sculpture influenced by Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, and Andy Goldsworthy. He used a camera to document walking and interventions in the landscape, and later recalled that his interest gradually shifted from making objects in a studio to moving through the world and responding to what he encountered.^*1 In another interview, he recalled entering Sarah Lawrence College intending to become a painter and graduating in 1992 as a photographer.^*27 Photography allowed Soth to preserve the acts of moving, searching, and encountering the unexpected as part of the work itself.

Photography also became a means of making contact with other people. Soth has described himself as intensely shy since childhood. Early on he was drawn to earthworks that allowed him to avoid people, but after encountering the portraits of Diane Arbus and Peter Hujar, he made approaching strangers itself a photographic task.^*1 Perfect Strangers was an early series in which he turned that difficulty into a concrete procedure by approaching and photographing people he did not know in parks. He later described the car as a “safety bubble” that protected him from the outside world, and recognized a similar quality in photography: it connects him to the world while preserving a degree of distance.^*4 His description of photography as a medium that “stops time,” and of the lens as a separation that remains between photographer and subject, belongs to the same awareness of distance.^*34

In an interview first published in IMA 2019 Winter and posted online in 2020, Soth also said that as a young artist he chose photography over painting partly because he felt he could reach his own “voice” comparatively quickly through the medium.^*47 In the same interview, he described photographing as an excuse to go out, meet people, and experience nature and places.^*47 Photography let Soth approach other people while retaining the freedom to travel alone and the separation created by the lens. Those three conditions became fundamental to his later road projects and portraiture.

Learning Through Photobooks

Soth’s understanding of photography was shaped by reading photobooks before he had regular access to exhibitions. He has explained that he learned photography before the internet in a place with few exhibitions, so books became his primary way of seeing photographs. From the beginning, he also treated the photobook as an essential form for presenting his own work.^*31 In Aperture, he recalled finding a sense of “romantic loneliness” in Robert Adams’s Summer Nights when he was young, and compared photographic history to a vocabulary and the influence of individual photographers to dialects.^*2 In an interview with Canon, he identifies Masahisa Fukase’s The Solitude of Ravens as an important photobook that combines elements of the road with a strong emotional register.^*26 Before becoming an established photographer, Soth had already learned to think of photography as a language in which mood and meaning accumulate across multiple images in a book while each photograph retains its own specificity.

At Sarah Lawrence College, he studied with Joel Sternfeld, whom he later described as a “very influential teacher.”^*27 Jeu de Paume notes that during his studies from 1989 to 1991, he developed a deeper interest in 1970s American photography and New Topographics.^*55 Soth has also said that after graduation he continued trying to establish a difference from Sternfeld, eventually acknowledging that influence while developing his own method.^*12 Two lessons came together in his later work: thinking through photographs by arranging them in sequence, learned from photobooks, and seeing by moving through places, learned from American photography.

Why Narrative?

Soth has said that storytelling does not come naturally to him, yet he has repeatedly been drawn to the narrative force of film and the novel. At the same time, he regards photography as poorly equipped to narrate what happens before and after an event, or to establish causality in continuous form.^*48 In a conversation with Aperture, he said that he prefers to approach narrative indirectly through photographs and photobooks.^*41

In The Brooklyn Rail, Soth identified “longing”—a desire for some other state—as a recurring term across his work. He associated Sleeping by the Mississippi with movement and freedom, NIAGARA with love and romance, Broken Manual with escape, and Songbook with the desire for community and social connection.^*27 These subjects have no single factual form that a photograph can simply record. MoMA’s Quentin Bajac cites Soth describing how he photographs real places without treating them as objective topography; through photographing, he constructs a place and thinks of it as something closer to a novel.^*30 For Soth, narrative became a structure through which desires and losses that cannot be contained in a single photograph recur across separate people, rooms, objects, and landscapes. The sequence leaves the life of the person photographed unexplained.

Road Trips and Shooting Lists

The road functions as a working procedure for gathering otherwise unrelated fragments. Rebecca Bengal compares Robert Frank’s list of subjects in his Guggenheim application with Soth’s habit of taping shooting lists to his steering wheel, locating both within an American road-photography tradition in which departures from the planned route generate other narratives.^*53 Soth’s lists mix practical subjects such as “motels” and “wedding chapels” with associative or difficult-to-realize prompts. The lists set a direction in which unexpected subjects and people might be encountered; completing every item is beside the point.^*5 In an interview with IMA, Soth likewise describes this as a “half-conceptual” method: he begins with a flexible concept and keywords, then changes the plan when reality offers more than he anticipated.^*47

In Aperture, Soth acknowledges the road trip as a familiar, even clichéd form, yet explains that he keeps returning to it because it functions as a process of making and because a line with a direction of travel can suggest narrative.^*52 Magnum, drawing on Soth’s own analogy, describes his search as something like surfing the web in the physical world.^*23 The road gives the act of photographing a temporal order: one place leads to the next, and people and places unknown to one another can later be gathered into a single photobook. For Soth, the road is both an emblematic American subject and a method for producing a succession of chance encounters.

The 8×10 Camera and the Encounter

If the road keeps him moving toward the next place, the 8×10-inch view camera stops that movement in front of a single person. Soth has said that he values the camera for the way three-dimensional space becomes a flat image on the ground glass, and for the fact that photographers such as Nicholas Nixon, Sally Mann, and Stephen Shore have produced very different pictures with the same tool.^*4 In an interview with 1854 Photography, he explained that he first approaches a person without the camera, then brings out the large-format camera and continues the conversation while working under the dark cloth and making the photograph slowly.^*38 The Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery similarly notes that the time required to prepare an 8×10 camera can produce a strong relationship between photographer and sitter.^*37

The 8×10 records fine detail, but it also interrupts the motion of the road and creates time spent in the same place with a stranger. The resulting frame retains clothing, walls, gardens, furniture, and possessions alongside facial expression. A study in PÓS places Sleeping by the Mississippi between the immediacy of snapshot or photojournalistic photography and a more emotionally restrained, deadpan formalism.^*28 A single portrait therefore becomes a field of details that can enter into relationships with beds, rooms, objects, or other people on later pages, leaving personality open rather than fixed.

Photobook Sequencing

For Soth, the book is a working space in which relationships between images are made. In an international questionnaire on the photobook, he describes laying out large numbers of small prints, moving them around like a card game, and making dummies to test the actual movement from page to page.^*31 SFMOMA notes that Frank spent a year selecting and sequencing photographs for The Americans through themes, forms, emotions, and verbal associations. In this tradition of road photography, editing is one of the processes through which travel becomes a work.^*42 The National Gallery of Art likewise identifies the post-Frank photobook as a major form for conveying a photographer’s own experience of the world, beyond the idea of an objective record.^*36

Soth compares photographic sequencing to a game of connecting the dots. If the points are too close, the relationship becomes obvious; if they are too far apart, coherence disappears. His aim is to create an interval that viewers can complete for themselves.^*47 In The Photographic Journal, he similarly describes his work as closer to poetry than to a story with a plot, calling the photobook a “semi-narrative structure.”^*48 Alfredo Brant’s peer-reviewed study of NIAGARA analyzes this process through the concepts of storyworld and worldmaking. Brant argues that the arrangement of different photographs creates possible temporal and causal relations, allowing viewers to connect fragments and construct a narrative world.^*29

Discussing a new edition of Sleeping by the Mississippi, Soth has said that adding a single photograph, turning an image into a spread, or even changing the color of the endpapers can alter the feel of the entire book.^*46 By placing an empty bed, a river, or another person after a portrait, Soth can let “loneliness” recur throughout the book without assigning it to one individual’s psychology. The sequence can also leave unresolved who wrote a letter, what a person is thinking, or what happens next. Editing becomes a way to create an emotional continuity across several photographs without fixing real people within a single plot.

Documentary and Narrative

Soth’s people and rooms are real, and the encounters at the time of photographing are concrete experiences. Yet the currents of loneliness or love that emerge once the pictures are sequenced do not correspond to a verified order of events. In a GQ interview about Songbook, Soth explained that he removed much of the text and news context from the earlier Dispatch material to make a more lyrical and open-ended book.^*49 Fraenkel Gallery also describes Songbook as a work that removes precise explanations of events and addresses community and isolation through lyrical flow more than logical exposition.^*17

Soth’s storytelling can move in the opposite direction from using text to fill what photography cannot narrate. In an interview with Phaidon, he described photography as a fragmentary medium closer to poetry than the novel. For Songbook, he said that even when a compelling true story lay behind an image, he tried to forget it and ask whether the photograph itself retained mystery and contributed to the feeling of the book as a whole.^*50 The process has three distinct stages: gathering different fragments on the road, spending time on a single encounter with the 8×10, and arranging photographs in a book without overloading them with factual explanation. This allows records of real encounters and imagined connections between photographs to coexist within the same work.

Sleeping by the Mississippi

Made between 1999 and 2002, Sleeping by the Mississippi began without the aim of producing a continuous topography of the Mississippi River. In the official series, people, houses, beds, cemeteries, religious signs, and riverside landscapes alternate, and many photographs do not show the river at all.^*6 Soth later explained that he was interested in the dreams and imaginations of people he met along the river, and that the work was never conceived as austere documentary photography.^*7 In SFMOMA’s Charles, Vasa, MN, 2002, a man holding a model airplane appears together with snow, a house, and objects in the yard; the photograph does not reduce its meaning to the sitter’s eccentricity.^*8

Critic Rick Poynor argues that the photobook is inherently sequential, and that this book moves among people, unoccupied interiors, and landscapes to create a world through the tension between presence and absence.^*39 Beds, chairs, photographs within photographs, and religious signs recur throughout the book. The Mississippi therefore functions as a guide that places distant fragments within the same current. Rebecca Bengal similarly writes that the subjects on Soth’s lists seldom become the work exactly as written; just as the river gives him a reason to travel alongside it, movement produces other discoveries.^*53 Taken together with Soth’s comments on editing later editions, the book’s structure tests how far geographically separate people and places can be placed within a shared emotional current.^*46

NIAGARA

NIAGARA (2006) combines the tourist spectacle of the falls with honeymoon motels, portraits of couples, nude figures, vacant rooms, and handwritten love letters, bringing ideals of romance and their breakdown into the same geography.^*10 Soth has recalled that on his first visit, the aging motels and economic deterioration on the American side made a stronger impression than the romantic image he had associated with Niagara.^*9 Writing in The New Yorker, Vince Aletti described Niagara as both a geographical place and a psychological state, and argued that the letters add an emotional layer to Soth’s restrained documentary photographs.^*32

Love letters play a particular role in the book’s narrative construction. Brant notes that the letters remain unmatched to specific portrait subjects. As viewers move among people, rooms, the falls, and fragments of writing, they can provisionally construct several possible relationships.^*29 The book never explains that a particular couple separated in a particular way. Letters whose authors remain unidentified sit beside different people and empty rooms, allowing love, separation, and fantasies of marriage to recur across the book instead of belonging to one biography. Editing is central for Soth because it lets the theme of romance disperse across several photographs without fixing real people inside a single storyline.

Broken Manual

Broken Manual (2010) follows monks, hermits, survivalists, underground bunkers, and cabins in the woods, tracing the desire to disappear from society. The project began in the American South through a commission from the High Museum and expanded from an interest in fugitives and monastic life toward men who had withdrawn from society.^*11 The published work includes photographs alongside a manual-like format containing texts by the fictional writer Lester B. Morrison, placing an explicitly fictional voice outside the photographs.^*13 Soth has described the project as holding together two things: the desire to escape and the recognition that complete withdrawal from society is impossible.^*12

In The New Yorker, Aletti observed that some photographs have a coolness reminiscent of surveillance records or mug shots, while other portraits convey empathy.^*33 In Sleeping by the Mississippi and NIAGARA, gaps between photographs leave room for narrative. Broken Manual deliberately intensifies that narrative apparatus by introducing a fictional narrator and text. Yet the book never becomes a practical guide to “how to escape.” The more it searches for ways to hide, the more Soth’s own desire to disappear is placed beside the actual lives of the people he photographs. In retrospect, given that Songbook removes specific true stories and I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating weakens the larger narrative structure, Broken Manual can be seen as the work in which Soth brings the machinery of narrative most visibly to the foreground, including a fictional voice.

Little Brown Mushroom

Founded in 2008, Little Brown Mushroom (LBM) extended the photobook beyond a means of distributing finished work into a place for testing forms of narrative. Soth’s official biography describes LBM as a publishing and multimedia enterprise.^*24 LBM itself describes its purpose as an experiment in “visual storytelling,” and has developed publishing and educational projects with writers and designers as well as photographers.^*51 Magnum’s profile likewise presents Soth’s work as spanning photobooks, independent publishing, commissions, and his work with the agency.^*23

LBM experimented with combinations of photography and writing, newspapers, children’s books, and slideshows, testing forms that could carry narrative while preserving gaps in photographic meaning. In Phaidon, Soth described LBM as a place to experiment with the relationship between photography and storytelling.^*50 The approach Soth describes in Aperture—selecting and discarding photographs, building dummies, and thinking through the final physical form of the book—also appears in LBM as an activity in which making, editing, and publishing remain connected.^*41

Songbook

In Songbook (2015), Soth’s method of creating narrative shifts from adding information to removing specific true stories. MACK describes the book as a reediting of black-and-white photographs made between 2012 and 2014 for The LBM Dispatch and magazine assignments, detached from their original news contexts.^*14 In Dispatch, Brad Zellar’s writing and Soth’s photographs conveyed specific places and events. In the photobook, Soth removed much of that background information and gave priority to the rhythm between photographs.^*15 Dances, school events, bars, gatherings, and family occasions appear in the official series. Detached from a report on particular communities, they become a sequence in which gathering and isolation alternate.^*16

In GQ, Soth explained that he wanted to remove words and news context and make the photographic sequence more intuitive and non-narrative.^*49 In Phaidon, he cites Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio as an important reference and describes his attraction to the sense of a place suspended between the real and the fictional.^*50 Fraenkel Gallery similarly describes the series as removing specific information and addressing the longing for American community through lyricism more than logic.^*17 By removing true stories gathered during reporting, the events in individual photographs become harder to fix, while separate images acquire new relationships within the book. Songbook makes especially clear that, for Soth, creating narrative is not the same as explaining events.

I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating

I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating (2019) questions the large-scale series structures that had become one of Soth’s established methods. The official series consists of people and interiors photographed around the world, without first imposing a geographical subject such as the Mississippi or Niagara, or a category such as “fugitives.”^*19 Foam describes the series as narrowing its attention to people, private rooms, windows, and possessions, returning the work to the act of looking at another person itself.^*43 In an interview with The Guardian, Soth also said that bookshelves and details within a room can speak about a person, allowing a still life to function as a portrait.^*44

The series centers on the power involved in photographing and editing people as material for a larger theme; the move from outdoor subjects to interiors is one consequence of that concern. In IMA, Soth described an ethical discomfort with the photographer’s control over the instant of exposure, the selection of images, and their presentation in exhibitions or books—and with the use of another person as an element within the photographer’s work.^*47 In Musée Magazine, he also discussed his discomfort with portraiture becoming a professional routine and the need to think of photographing again as an exchange between people.^*45 Soth stays with one person and one room for an extended period, without subsuming the sitter into a larger subject such as the Mississippi River or “fugitives.” Faces and possessions are rendered in detail, but no storyline converts those details directly into an explanation of inner life. The series reexamines Soth’s long-standing use of storytelling through the question of how far another person can be incorporated into the photographer’s own narrative.

A Pound of Pictures

A Pound of Pictures (2022) returns to driving across the United States while making photographing, collecting, and preserving pictures its subject. MACK describes the book as combining photographs made from 2018 to 2021 with vernacular photographs inserted randomly into each copy, addressing photography’s desire to preserve experience as images.^*20 The official series includes darkrooms, boxes of old photographs, camera clubs, graves, people, and tourist sites, placing the making of new photographs and the keeping of existing ones along the same road.^*21

Soth has explained that the project initially followed the route of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train. The work stalled when he tried to make the photographs conform to that clear idea, and only moved toward its final form after he abandoned the plan.^*4 In an Aperture conversation with Siri Hustvedt, Soth calls the book the ultimate form for his work while cautioning against dependence on a single narrative. He describes the road as a line that does not provide a story directly but can “suggest” one.^*52 Associations among flowers, old photographs, graves, cars, Lincoln, and Walt Whitman never converge into one plot. Photographing, collecting, and keeping recur throughout the book, making photography’s attempt to preserve experience and memory the subject itself.

Walker Evans and Literature

Walker Evans is a key precedent for understanding Soth’s approach to storytelling. David Campany emphasizes Evans’s editorial work in Fortune and elsewhere, where text and photograph do not simply explain one another; the gap between them leaves interpretation to the reader.^*40 MoMA’s Bajac likewise invokes Evans’s “documentary style” when placing Soth within a lineage of contemporary photographers who use series to give meaning to otherwise isolated photographs.^*30 What Soth took from Evans includes frontal composition and the use of signs, as well as an editorial attitude: recording the details of reality while allowing meaning to emerge from the arrangement of multiple photographs and texts, without closing it within one image or caption.

While making Songbook, Soth has said that he looked to Walker Evans and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, along with books combining photographs and writing by Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor, and by Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell.^*50 What ultimately interested him most was a form in which writing did not settle the meaning of a photograph, and image and text could retain separate voices while entering the same world. That interest continued in Little Brown Mushroom, where photographers, writers, and designers collaborated on books.

Robert Frank and Road Photography

In Robert Frank’s The Americans, the road and the edit transform travel records into the photographer’s own image of America. MoMA describes Frank, a Swiss-born photographer, traveling roughly 10,000 miles and using the mobility of a small handheld camera to register tensions of race, class, religion, and consumer culture in postwar America.^*35 The National Gallery of Art argues that the book showed later generations how a photobook could inscribe the photographer’s own experience of the world, expanding the form beyond the expectation of objective description.^*36 SFMOMA emphasizes that a year of selection and sequencing organized themes, forms, emotions, and verbal associations.^*42

Bengal directly compares Frank’s proposed list of subjects with Soth’s lists, finding continuity in the way detours on the road generate narratives other than those initially planned.^*53 Soth’s strongest identification with Frank was not with grainy black-and-white style, but with the presence of the photographer in images such as those looking out from hotel windows.^*12 In his Canon interview, he likewise cites Frank as an important precedent for bringing feelings of love and longing into road photography.^*26 Frank used a handheld camera to catch social fractures and gestures while moving. Soth stops the car, sets up a tripod, and spends time with a stranger, then relates that encounter to other people and places on the page. In Soth’s work, the subjectivity of the traveling photographer appears in both the encounter before the exposure and the sequencing that follows it.

Shore, Sternfeld, and Large-Format Color

The line from Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld to Soth involves more than the shared use of large-format color. Soth studied with Sternfeld and, after college, absorbed a large-format color approach associated with Shore and Sternfeld into his own road-based work.^*27 Soth has described Shore as a photographer strongly concerned with composition and form, while locating himself closer to Robert Frank in the way outward-looking photographs can be directed toward inward desires.^*47 In an Artdoc interview, he also speaks of wanting to add emotional content to the precise descriptive mode associated with New Topographics.^*34

In Soth’s large-format photographs, wrinkles in a bedspread, photographs pinned to a wall, objects held by a sitter, and tools left in a yard are rendered with the same precision. The PÓS study places Sleeping by the Mississippi between immediacy and formalism because exact outward description and recurring emotional motifs coexist within the work.^*28 The clarity of large-format photography that Soth learned from Shore and Sternfeld records the form of a place together with details that suggest the desires and dreams of the people who inhabit it. Those details acquire meaning through recurrence with objects and places elsewhere in the book, without claiming to explain a person’s psychology in a single image.

Arbus, Hujar, and Portraiture

Diane Arbus was both a precedent that gave Soth the courage to approach strangers and, later, a point of comparison for thinking about the risks of turning portrait subjects into narratives. Soth has referred to an “Arbus problem”: the possibility that a real person’s difference can be intensified for the sake of the photographer’s work until it obscures the person themselves.^*12 In later years, Soth has referred more strongly to Peter Hujar, drawn to portraits that confront a sitter directly while reducing the sensational effect of spectacle.^*12

The extended encounter produced by a large-format camera does not in itself resolve this ethical problem. As the National Portrait Gallery notes, the time required to prepare an 8×10 creates a kind of encounter distinct from the snapshot.^*37 The PÓS study compares Charles, Vasa, MN with Arbus’s frontal portraiture while arguing that the meaning of “eccentricity” is not fixed by the portrait alone; it shifts according to surrounding objects, other photographs in the series, and the viewer’s judgment.^*28 Within Soth’s sequences, preserving this uncertainty helps prevent a real person from being too firmly fixed into a predetermined role.

Larry Sultan and the Narrative Photobook

Larry Sultan’s Pictures from Home offers a precedent for Soth’s photobooks from a lineage outside road photography. In The Photographic Journal, Soth cites it as a major achievement of the narrative photobook.^*48 According to MACK, Sultan spent a decade in the 1980s returning to his parents’ home, combining contemporary photographs, stills from home movies, conversations, his own writing, and memorabilia into a “narrative collage” in which the boundary between documentary and staging remains unstable.^*54

In Pictures from Home, contemporary photographs, old family footage, conversations, and writing both supplement and contradict one another within the same book.^*54 Soth uses letters in NIAGARA and fictional writing in Broken Manual, while Songbook removes true stories. Across these works he alternates between adding narrative information and reducing it so that relationships between photographs carry more of the meaning, adjusting how much fragmentariness remains from project to project.

Narrative and the Ethics of Portraiture

In Soth’s later work, a self-critical attitude emerges toward the very ability to create narratives between photographs. Fraenkel Gallery traces a movement from the open-ended long-term projects of his early career through Songbook to I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating, where attention narrows from the larger story of “America” to one-to-one encounters.^*17 In an Aperture conversation, Soth acknowledges that viewers can project a degree of intimacy onto portraits that was not actually present, while also describing photography itself as a medium that produces distance.^*52 The act of arranging photographs to create meaning overlaps with the act of incorporating real people into an author’s theme.

In the storyworld described by Brant, viewers supply relationships between photographs that the author leaves unresolved.^*29 During the period of I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating, Soth himself expressed ethical discomfort with the photographer’s control over the shutter, selection, and presentation, and with treating a person as one element within a work.^*45 In the later work, Soth loosens the strong thematic links between different people and spends more time with one person in one room. Here Soth continues to use storytelling while examining the point at which connecting photographs begins to determine the meaning of another person.

Reception and Historical Position

After Sleeping by the Mississippi was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, the Walker Art Center organized From Here to There: Alec Soth's America in 2010, the first major U.S. survey of his work, bringing together more than one hundred photographs made since 1994.^*25 The Walker exhibition placed Soth’s research, chance encounters, large-format camera, and serial projects within a history of American road photography extending through Evans, Frank, Eggleston, and Shore.^*3 The exhibition positioned Soth within the question of how forms developed in twentieth-century American photography were inherited and altered after 2000, beyond his reputation as a prominent photobook maker.^*3

In Japan, the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama presented Gathered Leaves in 2022, bringing together major series and reconfiguring work developed through photobooks within the exhibition space.^*22 Tokyo Photographic Art Museum’s 2024–2025 exhibition A Room of Rooms traced the recurring motif of the interior from Soth’s early work through I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating.^*18 Soth’s place in photographic history rests on a method that begins from photography’s inability to fully narrate continuous time: he gathers fragments on the road, gives individual encounters time through the 8×10 camera, and creates relationships among distant fragments in the photobook. In later work, he also made the consequences of that narrativization—the extent to which it can determine the meaning of real people—a subject of his own work. Across successive projects, Soth has tested how much narrative photography can sustain and where its limits lie.