Alec Soth (1969-) is an American photographer born and based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 2004 his first book, and breakthrough work, Sleeping By The Mississippi was published. The book contains 46 images of people and places along the Mississippi. Shot over a five year period, the images follow the banks of America’s longest river from the frozen northern reaches in Minnesota to the squalor of the Mississippi Delta in Louisiana. The breadth of Sleeping by the Mississippi was summed up by Anne Wilkes Tucker in her essay published in the book, stating:
Soth alludes to illness, procreation, race, crime, learning, art, music, death, religion, redemption, politics, and cheap sex
Anne Wilkes Tucker
The work follows in the traditions of Robert Frank’s The Americans and Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places and like Shore, Soth used a large format camera to create the work. He credited this with helping him overcome his shyness when photographing people, as his first interaction with them tended to be without a camera.
Without seeing both complete works it is difficult to compare Sleeping by the Mississippi and Uncommon Places, however, looking at the images which are available online there does appear to be a subtle difference between the two. To put it into simple terms, Shore’s work seems to concentrate more on places whereas Soth’s work appears to be about people and places.
In the video below from 2017, Giles Huxley-Parlour, director at Beetles & Huxley, talks about Sleeping By The Mississippi which was exhibited at the gallery to coincide with a new edition of the book.
What I like about Sleeping By The Mississippi is the narrative qulity, it tells a story of the people that live along the river and uses the river, which does not appear in many images, as the common thread. As Soth said in a masterclass in 2012, “…you’re sort of photographing place, but it’s sort of just using place as a metaphor for wandering…” (Soth, 2012)
I think as a student there are two important lessons one can learn from the work, first the importance of moving out of your comfort zone, trying new things that maybe unfamiliar and uncomfortable. Second is that work can develop over time, I think when following the course there is a tendency to think in 6 – 8 week time frames for each assignment, however, the fact that it took Soth several years to create the images that feature in Sleeping By The Mississippi demonstrates the importance of thinking about producing work over a longer time scale so that it has time to develop and evolve.
Sources
Sleeping By The Mississippi • Alec Soth • Magnum Photos (2017) At: https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/alec-soth-sleeping-by-the-mississippi/ (Accessed 20/07/2020).
Alec Soth: Sleeping by the Mississippi (s.d.) At: https://www.mmam.org/blog/2019/5/9/soth (Accessed 20/07/2020).
Alec Soth, Sleeping by the Mississippi at Beetles+Huxley (2017) At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=zJYTSaZgb2k&feature=emb_logo (Accessed 21/07/2020).
Alec Soth is Sleeping by the Mississippi (2017) At: https://www.bjp-online.com/2017/11/alec-soth-mississippi/ (Accessed 15/07/2020).
Alec Soth | Sleeping by the Mississippi (s.d.) At: https://www.alecsoth.com/photography/projects/sleeping-by-the-mississippi (Accessed 20/07/2020).
Alec Soth (2020) In: Wikipedia. At: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alec_Soth&oldid=961366304 (Accessed 20/07/2020).
Google Photography Hangout Masterclass with Alec Sloth (2012) At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=118&v=d-IWm_utIyU&feature=emb_logo (Accessed 21/07/2020).
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