LH “Jug” Lowell, Buffalo Bills Birthday Party, Lookout Mountain, Colorado by Alec Soth, from the forthcoming Colorado, part of the Little Brown Mushroom Dispatches project.

Alec Soth

Alec Soth’s Summer Nights at the Dollar Tree: a short film in appreciative response to Robert Adams’s Summer Nights.

“In Gatlinburg, Tennessee, November 1980, the photograph that Soth credits as a motivating influence for his Sleeping By The Mississippi work, we see some of the central strands of his later endeavours. Tucked into the lowest edge of the foreground is the van that Sternfeld used as he travelled the breadth of the country making his work. It is outsize against the smattering of saloon cars that surround it in a relatively empty car park that seems small against the profusion of tall trees that flank the surrounding mountains. The typically squat three-story buildings that border the car park are mainly motels and hotels. They are bland, tepid, evidently unoccupied at this late phase of the off-season, somehow anachronistic and unromantic when counterpointed by the easy natural splendour of the autumnal colours that spread out all around them.

Elsewhere in American Prospects Sternfeld photographs the public and private delights of American leisure, but here he arrives at the underbelly, the hibernating small town in the dead of the off-season, and describes the bleak and lonely business of waiting for the spring. In this the picture opens up the vein in which much of Soth’s subsequent work has operated, examining the obverse face of America’s mythical figures: the Mississippi and dreams, Niagara Falls and romantic love, the Wilderness and the sensuous appeal of utter isolation. Gatlinburg, Tennessee prefigures a way into a photographic fascination with a society that has a deep historical habit of moving in and moving on so very swiftly, and with little thought for the circumstances of what is left behind. In a sense Sleeping By The Mississippi, Niagara, Last Days of W and Broken Manual also arrive in the off-season, and wander purposefully but inquisitively around the peripheries to unearth the beautiful and enigmatic complexities of what remains long after the sun has passed its peak. There are traces in the Gatlinburg picture, subsequently developed and sharply expanded by Soth, of the torrid relationship between romance and loneliness, of the interdependence between over-production and over-consumption, but also traces of an obsession with a singular goal (the photographer’s or his subject’s) and a willingness to refashion a life or a landscape in the pursuit of it.”

— from “Ballad of a Lonely Boy: the work of Alec Soth”

“The function of portrait painting was to underwrite and idealise a chosen social role of the sitter. It was not to present him as ‘an individual’ but, rather, as an individual monarch, bishop, landowner, merchant and so on. Each role had its accepted qualities and its acceptable limit of discrepancy. (A monarch or a pope could be far more idiosyncratic than a mere gentleman or courtier.) The role was emphasised by pose, gesture, clothes and background. (…)

The satisfaction of having one’s portrait painted was the satisfaction of being personally recognised and confirmed in one’s position: it had nothing to do with the modern lonely desire to be recognised ‘for what one really is’. (…)

It seems that the demands of a modern vision are incompatible with the singularity of viewpoint which is the prerequisite for a static-painted ‘likeness’. The incompatibility is connected with a more general crisis concerning the meaning of individuality. Individuality can no longer be contained within the terms of manifest personality traits. In a world of transition and revolution individuality has become a problem of historical and social relations, such as cannot be revealed by the mere characterizations of an already established social stereotype. Every mode of individuality now relates to the whole world.”

— John Berger, “The Changing View of Man in the Portrait” in Selected Essays.

Images in order: August Sander, Young Farmers, Westerwald, 1914; Alex Dellow, Teddy Boys, Tottenham 1954; Robert Frank, Newburgh, New York, 1955; Alec Soth, Josh Joelton, Tennessee; Bryan Schutmaat, Perry, Cascade, Montana

“I fully embrace terms like “documentary fiction,” “post-documentary,” “expanded documentary,” etc. The thing that’s worth pointing out with these terms is that fiction is more of a frame than anything else. The problem with work that purports to have documentary intention is that the work adheres to unrealistic and slippery definitions, codes, ethics, and assumptions. Social documentary work tries to evade these adherences by foregrounding narrative and human qualities, the implication being that the emotional tenor helps expand what we might consider to be documentary. But by using the word fiction, the author embraces the notion that the work involves expanded and fabricated realities. It’s very much informed by notions of the document and indexicality in creating narrative works. This book is about reality and things that happened and continue to happen to people and place. What happens to Blisner over the course of the condensed chronology that the book passes through is based on events, documents and people who lived in south Chicago and southern Illinois in the last 100 years. Very little is fully fabricated from the point of its conception.”

— from Blisner, Ill.: A Conversation with Daniel Shea, just published at thegreatleapsideways.com

“The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.” — Ernest Hemingway.

Images selected from the essay Ballad of a Lonely Boy: the work of Alec Soth, published at thegreatleapsideways.com. Photographs © Alec Soth, from Niagara, Broken Manual, Last Days of W, and Broken Manual respectively.

“Soth’s work, while equally attentive to the realities of the political economy of its moment, and while sensitive to the way that these are expressed and experienced in people’s everyday lives, is characterised by a pronounced inward turn that seems consistent with the atomising individualism of our contemporary norms. His is not an America that is easily charted between four mapped segments, is no longer a land governed by the overarching promise written into the founding myths, but is rather an internal and more essentially isolated one - an America that issues from a fundamental neglect. His is not work that seeks to map the continuous surface of a collective reality, but rather describes an interwoven array of individual aspirations fashioned from from a loneliness that is deeply characteristic of our time.”

— Excerpted from the essay “Ballad of a Lonely Boy: the work of Alec Soth”, up now at thegreatleapsideways.com