Alec Soth: Gathered Leaves Study Visit
Saturday 23 rd January 2016
Tutor: Helen Warburton
Exhibition Text Panels
This exhibition surveys a decade of work by acclaimed photographer Alec Soth
(born 1969). It brings together four of his major works – Sleeping by the Mississippi
(2004), Niagara (2006), Broken Manual (2010) and the most recent, Songbook
(2014). Soth is a fine artist, a Magnum photojournalist, a blogger, a self-publisher, an Instagrammer, an educator. He explores the many different forms photography takes in the world, and works to create different types of encounter with his audiences: from museum shows to live workshops conducted from his Winnebago.
This exhibition is conceived to reflect the evolution of Soth’s individual series as they have moved from the page of the maquette or book to the wall of the gallery.
A lyrical documentary photographer in the tradition of Robert Frank, Stephen
Shore and Joel Sternfeld, Soth regards himself first and foremost as an American photographer.
His country’s physical landscapes – the majestic Mississippi, the thundering
Niagara Falls, the wide open deserts and wildernesses, the small towns and suburbs – have provided the structure and setting for his poetic surveys of
American life.
The exhibition title, Gathered Leaves, refers on one level to photography simply as sheets of paper brought together. It is also a line taken from that quintessentially
American epic, Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself (1855). Whitman’s poem catalogued the diversity of the nation on the eve of the Civil War. Soth’s America, in the early 21st century, is also described in a time of tension, as the nation wrestles its conflicting desires for individualism and community.
SLEEPING BY THE MISSISSIPPI (2004)
Soth was born and continues to live in Minneapolis. Not far from his home town rises the mighty Mississippi, that iconic American river immortalised in the
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In 2004, Soth set off to travel its 2000-mile course, following it slowly southwards to the Gulf of Mexico, photographing on his largeformat camera en route. Many great artists, from Jack Kerouac to Robert Frank, have taken the American road trip; here Soth gives it a modern twist.
The river transports us to another place, literally and metaphorically. It is the association of water with escape, and with a wandering imagination, that interests
Soth. The imagery of dreams and dreaming flows like a current through this work.
He photographs the boyhood homes of visionaries such as the aviator Charles
Lindbergh, or the singer Johnny Cash. He portrays unsung dreamers such as
Bonnie, a minister’s wife who thinks of God and treasures her photograph of an angel; or Crystal, in her Easter best, her bedspread decorated with the princesses she dreams of being. The motif of the empty bed surfaces often in Sleeping by the

Mississippi: in motel rooms and sickrooms, abandoned on the river’s marshy banks and floating in its waters. It is a vehicle for dreaming, just like Charles’s model plane or Huck Finn’s raft. And at the same time it is a place that we will all, eventually, leave behind.
NIAGARA (2006)
Niagara Falls, the site of spectacular suicides and affordable honeymoons, has long been associated with love. Soth visited Niagara seven times in the making of his next series, circling the town and searching for the way to describe his subject. He said: ‘When I think of the Falls as a metaphor, I think of a kind of intensified sexuality and unsustainable desire.’
He flirts with the picture-postcard cliché of Niagara, a subject also beloved by the painters of the American sublime. He collects the evidence of passion: notes and letters, snippets of poetry, the symbol of the heart creeping into unexpected places. He meets people in bars and wedding venues and persuades them to pose for him. He photographs the façades of tawdry motels such as the Happiness Inn, hiding who-knows-what dramas behind their closed doors.
Then, he juxtaposes his beautiful photographs of the waters, overflowing for ever into eternity, with his portraits of the hopeful and the broken-hearted. In Niagara the epic grandeur of nature is contrasted powerfully with the imagery of fragile love.
BROKEN MANUAL (2010)
Broken Manual explores the desire to run away. Soth began researching Eric
Robert Rudolph, the ‘Olympic Park Bomber’, a right-wing radical on the run from the FBI and known to be hiding somewhere in the Appalachian wilderness. As his research evolved, Soth became immersed in a world he found on the internet.
There, he discovered communications and manifestos put out by people who had chosen to withdraw from civilisation: survivalists, hermits and monks.
He made his own instruction manual, How to Disappear in Amerika (2009), a maquette that evolved into the book Broken Manual. It included writings by one
Lester B Morrison. A number of self-published zines followed in 2010, all created by Soth’s Little Brown Mushroom publishing venture: Library for Broken Men,
Lonely Bearded Men and Lester Becomes Me (the latter our clue to Lester’s true identity).
Soth went in search of the hermits he had found online. And, in a sense, like Walt
Whitman wandering America in the mid 19th century, he went on a search for himself. The project marks a period when he returned to a life on the road as an itinerant photographer, and he has spoken of his own desire to escape at that time. He has also said how much he identifies with his cast of dreamers and loners, especially the men: ‘I have a lot of tenderness for these men generally. I respect their choices and I try to understand them.’ He is drawn to the intensity of an introspective life: ‘There’s definitely a self-portrait aspect to this ... a personal,

autobiographical element to it.’
He found his recluses in the vast unpopulated landscapes of America – in the dense forests and expansive deserts. He photographs them in their solitude, as small figures dwarfed in their settings. Sometimes he leaves them out of the frame entirely and merely offers us clues to their existence. He pulls his camera right back, or zooms in very close from a distance, as with Roland, a nocturnal hermit.
This creates an unnerving feeling of surveillance, which works to suggest a sense of separation between us and them. We are turned into voyeurs of secret, troubled lives. The fantasy of escape that so many of us harbour reveals a dark undertow.
The opaque numerical titles of these pictures are photographers’ code, intended to reflect the private symbolic languages that many hermits develop in their writings.
SONGBOOK (2012–14)
After Broken Manual, Soth wanted to reconnect with the world. Photography can be a lonely medium, both in its making and in the way, pictorially, that it expresses the distance between people, especially between photographer and subject. ‘A medium of separation’, Soth has called it. At the same time, instantaneous and communicative, it is also an excellent tool of social connection.
Soth’s very first job was as a photographer on a local newspaper on the eastern edge of Twin Cities, his daily photographic fare, council meetings and car crashes, weddings and community gatherings. He continues to admire the lack of artifice in journalistic photographs, just as he continues to work on assignment for newspapers and magazines, most recently for The New Yorker in New Orleans, ten years on from Hurricane Katrina.
In 2012, Soth embarked on a new project in collaboration with the writer Brad
Zellar. Together they crossed the country on a series of road trips. They worked as if journalists on a fictional paper, hunting down local interest stories, and reacting fast and furiously to events unfolding around them. At night they ‘holed up in their motel rooms, putting the paper together and matching pictures to stories’.
Seven modest, unbound publications resulted, each ‘Dispatch’ covering a different state: California, Colorado, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Texas and, finally, in 2014, back to the South, with Georgia.
Later, in the book that became Songbook, Soth’s photographs move from being vehicles of communication to repositories of feeling. The pictures are liberated from Zellar’s informative text and sequenced in a way that slows the pace and allows a sustained visual and emotional rhythm to build over 144 pages. Snippets of lyrics from the Great American Songbook – popular pieces by musicians such as
Cole Porter or Irving Berlin – appear interspersed with the photographs. This associative mechanism, together with his highly contrasted, black-and-white, midcentury style, works to conjure the precise mood that Soth was reaching for:
‘nostalgic but with an anxious, lonely quality to it as well’.

Songbook is a chronicle of 21st-century America. It explores the human condition in the digital age: an era when we have never been more connected – yet potentially never more separate.
Alec Soth Biography
Alec Soth (b. 1969) / Aged 47 is a photographer born and based in Minneapolis,
Minnesota. He has published over twenty-five books including Sleeping by the
Mississippi (2004), NIAGARA (2006) Broken Manual (2010) and Songbook (2015).
Soth has had over fifty solo exhibitions including survey shows organized by Jeu de
Paume in Paris (2008), the Walker Art Center in Minnesota (2010) and Media Space in London (2015). Soth has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2013). In 2008, Soth created Little Brown
Mushroom, a multi-media enterprise focused on visual storytelling. Soth is represented by Sean Kelly in New York, Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis, Fraenkel
Gallery in San Francisco, and is a member of Magnum Photos.
Since 2010 – Soth has been exhibited in over 15 Solo + 18 Group Exhibitions. 33 exhibitions. On average 6-7 shows a year.
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
FotoMuseum (Antwerp, Belgium) 2017
The Finnish Museum (Helsinki, Finland) 2016
The Finnish Museum (Helsinki, Finland) 2016
National Media Museum (Bradford, UK) 2016
SCAD Museum of Art (Atlanta, Georgia) 2015
Fotogalleriet (Oslo, Norway) 2015
Denver Art Museum(Denver, Colorado) 2015
Loock Galerie (Berlin, Germany) 2015
Media Space (London, UK) 2015
Weinstein Gallery (Minneapolis, MN) 2015
Fraenkel Gallery (San Fransico, CA ) 2015
Sean Kelly Gallery (New York, New York ) 2015
Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (Madison, WI) 2014
Weinstein Gallery (Minneapolis, MN) 2014
El Museo de Bogotá (Bogotá, Colombia) 2013
Sean Kelly Gallery (New York, NY) 2012
Rome International Photography Festival (Rome, Italy) 2011
Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN) 2010
Triennale di Milano (Milan, Italy) 2010
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam(Amsterdam, Netherlands) 2015
Plains Art Museum(Fargo, North Dakota) 2014
Fraenkel Gallery(San Francisco, CA) 2014

Dorsky Gallery(Long Island City, NY) 2014
NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale (Fort Lauderdale, FL) 2014
Müchner Stadlmuseum (Munich, Germany) 2014
The College of Wooster (Wooster, OH) 2014
BredaPhoto International Photo Festival (Breda, The Netherlands) 2014
Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (Detroit, MI) 2014
DOK:14 (Fredrikstad, Norway) 2014
Museum de Fundatie (Zwolle, The Netherlands ) 2014
Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art (Clinton, New York) 2014
Marco Museum of Contemporary Art (Monterrey, Mexico) 2014
Sprengel Museum (Hannover, Germany) 2014
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art (San Francisco, CA) 2011
Photomonth in Krakow (Krakow, Poland) 2011
Brighton Photo Biennial 2010 (Brighton, England) 2011
The Soap Factory (Minneapolis, MN) 2010
Magnum Profile
Wiki – states Soth became a nominee in 2004, and full member 2008.
Alec Soth’s work is rooted in the distinctly American tradition of ‘on-the-road photography’ developed by Walker Evans, Robert Frank and Stephen Shore. From
Huckleberry Finn to Easy Rider there seems to be a uniquely American desire to travel and chronicle the adventures that consequently ensue. He has received fellowships from the McKnight, Bush, and Jerome Foundations and was the recipient of the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography. His photographs are represented in major public and private collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Walker Art Center. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 2004 Whitney
Biennial and a career survey at the Jeu de Paume in 2008.
His first monograph, Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published by Steidl in 2004 to critical acclaim. Since then Soth has published NIAGARA (Steidl, 2006), Fashion
Magazine (Magnum, 2007), Dog Days, Bogotá (Steidl, 2007), The Last Days of W
(Little Brown Mushroom, 2008), and Broken Manual (Steidl, 2010). In 2008, Soth started his own publishing company, Little Brown Mushroom. He is represented by the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York and the Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis. Alec
Soth became a nominee of Magnum Photos in 2004 and a full member in 2008. He is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Education
1992 Bachelor of Arts, Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, USA
Awards - 9
2008 Bush Artist Fellowship
2008 PhotoVision Award
2006 Golden Light Book Award
2006 Deutsche Börse Prize (shortlisted artist)
2004 McKnight Photography Fellowship
2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography
2001 Minnesota State Arts Board
2001 MCAD / Jerome Fellowship
2001 Jerome Travel and Study Grant
1999 McKnight Photography Fellowship
Collections – 15
Albright-Knox Gallery of Art, Buffalo, NY
Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY, USA
Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, USA
Israel Museum of Contemporary Art, Jerusalem, Israel
LA County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA
Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, Wisconsin, USA
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, USA
Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, USA
Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, USA
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, USA
North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, North Dakota, USA
Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, USA
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, USA
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA
Magnum hosts the following Soth portfolios:
OHIO
BROKEN MANUAL
LAST DAYS OF W
PARIS / MINNESOTA
BOGOTA
NIAGARA
SONGBOOK