Songbook

by Alec Soth

Connu pour ses portraits obsédants d'Américains solitaires dans Sleeping by the Mississippi et Broken Manual, Alec Soth a récemment tourné son objectif vers la vie communautaire dans le pays. Pour l'aider dans sa recherche, Soth a assumé le rôle de plus en plus obsolète de journaliste de journal communautaire. De 2012 à 2014, Soth a voyagé État par État tout en travaillant sur son journal auto-publié, The LBM Dispatch, ainsi qu'en mission pour le New York Times et d'autres. Du nord de l'État de New York à la Silicon Valley, Soth a assisté à des centaines de réunions, danses, festivals et rassemblements communautaires à la recherche d'une interaction humaine à l'ère des réseaux sociaux virtuels. Avec Songbook, Soth a dépouillé ces images de leur contexte d'actualité afin de mettre en évidence le désir de connexion à leur racine. Fragmentaire, drôle et triste, Songbook est une représentation lyrique de la tension entre l'individualisme américain et le désir de s'unir.

Genres: Photography, Art, Art and Photography

144 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2014

About the author

Alec Soth (b. 1969) is a photographer born and based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has published over thirty books including Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), NIAGARA (2006), Broken Manual (2010), Songbook (2015), I Know How Furiously Your Heart is Beating (2019), A Pound of Pictures (2022), and Advice for Young Artists (2024).

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), Media Space in London (2015), and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (2024). 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 Hammons Gallery in Minneapolis, Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, Loock Galerie in Berlin, and is a member of Magnum Photos.

Reviews

[Janelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

These photographs are beautiful. Such an interesting sense of symmetry. Are they posed? Are they candid? Does it matter? They're recent -- all taken 2012-2014 -- but they have a feeling of a bygone era, or maybe that's just this urban east coast perspective talking. More later.

[Orest Mercator · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly fantastic eye -- used across huge swaths of subject matter, united in a slightly surreal yet documentary American portraiture. Love it.

[Brian Mulhall · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nice, but I think I would've liked a little more to it.

[Kevin Bjorke · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Dakotan heritage probably makes me exactly the target demographic for this touching book. These are people I knew, know still, will see again. Which tells you little, I know, save to let you know that I felt the human presence of each of these people, and heard Soth singing "you, you, you."