Alec Soth

Alec Soth was born in 1969 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and has remained rooted in the Upper Midwest throughout his career — a fact that distinguishes him from many of his contemporaries in contemporary art photography and that deeply informs the character of his work. He studied painting at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, where he first encountered photography as a serious art form through the work of Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, and Stephen Shore. By the time he graduated in 1992, he had shifted his focus from paint to the camera, though he retained a painter's sensitivity to colour, light, and the emotional temperature of a scene that would become hallmarks of his photographic vision.

After returning to Minneapolis, Soth spent nearly a decade refining his approach, working in relative obscurity while making periodic road trips through the heartland of America. He adopted the 8x10 large-format camera as his primary instrument — a cumbersome, deliberate tool that imposed a meditative pace on the act of photographing and that produced negatives of extraordinary detail and tonal richness. It was during these years of patient exploration that he began to develop the thematic preoccupations that would define his major work: solitude, longing, the tension between connection and isolation, and the vast, melancholy beauty of the American landscape as experienced not from its coasts and cities but from its rivers, backroads, and small towns.

The breakthrough came with Sleeping by the Mississippi, a body of work made between 1999 and 2002 as Soth travelled the length of the Mississippi River from its source near his home in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. The project combined portraits, landscapes, and still lifes into a sequence that read less like a conventional documentary project than like a waking dream. His subjects — a model-aeroplane builder in his cluttered workshop, a woman reclining in a houseboat, a pair of pristine white bedsheets laid out on a makeshift bed in an abandoned house — were linked not by geography or sociology but by a shared atmosphere of reverie and vulnerability. When the book was published by Steidl in 2004, it was immediately recognised as one of the most significant photobooks of the new century and drew comparisons to Robert Frank's The Americans and Walker Evans's American Photographs.

The success of Sleeping by the Mississippi brought Soth international recognition, and in 2004 he was nominated to Magnum Photos, the legendary cooperative agency, becoming a full member in 2008. His membership in Magnum placed him within a storied lineage of documentary photographers, though Soth's relationship to the documentary tradition has always been oblique. He has described his work as occupying a space between documentary and fiction, between journalism and poetry, and this productive ambiguity is central to its power. His photographs do not report on their subjects so much as they enter into a kind of quiet communion with them, creating images that feel at once deeply specific and universally resonant.

Subsequent major projects extended and deepened the thematic territory of the Mississippi work. Niagara (2006) explored the landscape around Niagara Falls as a site of romantic longing and disillusionment, pairing portraits of newlyweds and lovers with images of motels, love letters, and the falls themselves as a symbol of both sublime beauty and tourist kitsch. Broken Manual (2010) was a more austere and searching work, documenting men who had withdrawn from society — monks, survivalists, hermits, fugitives — living in caves, cabins, and abandoned structures in the American wilderness. The project took nearly four years to complete and represented Soth's most sustained meditation on the desire for isolation and the limits of human connection.

In addition to his major book projects, Soth has pursued a remarkably varied practice that includes self-published newspapers through his imprint Little Brown Mushroom, collaborative projects with writers and journalists, and a significant body of editorial and commercial work. His newspaper projects — modest, cheaply produced publications on subjects ranging from the Brighton photography scene to the residents of a single city block in his Minneapolis neighbourhood — reflect a commitment to the democratic possibilities of the photographic medium and a playful willingness to work outside the conventions of the art world. Little Brown Mushroom has become an influential model for independent photographic publishing.

More recently, Soth has turned inward with projects like I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating (2019), a series of intimate portraits and interiors made in the homes of strangers around the world. The work represents a departure from the epic road-trip format of his earlier projects in favour of a quieter, more contained exploration of the encounter between photographer and subject. The title, drawn from a poem by Wallace Stevens, signals the emotional register of the work: tender, attentive, and acutely aware of the fragility of the moment of photographic exchange.

Soth continues to live and work in Minneapolis, where he maintains his studio and publishing operations. His influence on contemporary photography has been substantial, both through his own work and through his generous engagement with the broader photographic community through teaching, lectures, and his widely followed social media presence. He has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Joop Swart Masterclass Award from World Press Photo. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and many other institutions worldwide.