Alec Soth

Alec Soth (born 1969) is an American photographer, based in Minneapolis.

Soth makes "large-scale American projects" featuring the midwestern United States.

New York Times art critic Hilarie M. Sheets wrote that he has made a "photographic career out of finding chemistry with strangers" and photographs "loners and dreamers".

His work tends to focus on the "off-beat, hauntingly banal images of modern America" according to The Guardian art critic Hannah Booth.

He is a member of Magnum Photos.

Soth has had various books of his work published by major publishers as well as self-published through his own Little Brown Mushroom.

His major publications are Sleeping by the Mississippi, Niagara, Broken Manual, Songbook, I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating, and A Pound of Pictures.

He concurrently produced the photo book From Here to There: Alec Soth's America, an overview of Soth's photography from the early 1990s to the present.

He has received fellowships from the McKnight and Jerome Foundations, was the recipient of the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography, and in 2021 received an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society.

His photographs are in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Walker Art Center.

His work has been exhibited widely including as part of the 2004 Whitney Biennial and a major solo exhibition at Media Space in London in 2015.

Soth was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States.

He studied at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York.

He was reported to be "painfully shy" in his youth.

Soth liked the work of Diane Arbus.

He traveled around the Mississippi River and made a self-printed book entitled Sleeping by the Mississippi which included both landscapes and portraits.

Curators for the 2004 Whitney Biennial put him in their show, and one of his photographs entitled "Charles", of a man in a flight suit on his roof holding two model airplanes, was used in their poster.

Soth's work has since been compared to that of Walker Evans and Stephen Shore.

He has photographed for The New York Times Magazine, Fortune and Newsweek.

When he photographs people, Soth feels nervous at times.

He said: "My own awkwardness comforts people, I think. It's part of the exchange."

When he was on the road, he'd have notes describing types of pictures he wanted taped to the steering wheel of his car.

One list was: "beards, birdwatchers, mushroom hunters, men's retreats, after the rain, figures from behind, suitcases, tall people (especially skinny), targets, tents, treehouses and tree lines".

With people, he'll ask their permission to photograph them, and often wait for them to get comfortable; he sometimes uses an 8x10 camera.

He tries to find a "narrative arc and true storytelling" and pictures in which each picture will lead to the next one.

Soth has been photographing different parts of the US since his first book, Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published in 2004.

His second book, Niagara, was published in 2006.

One of his photos is of a woman in a bridal gown sitting outside what appears to be a motel; he describes having made an arrangement with a particular wedding chapel in Niagara Falls which let him take pictures of couples getting married, by photographing them after their weddings.

Soth made several more photographic books including Last Days of W, a book about a country "exhausted by George W. Bush's presidency".

Soth spent the years between 2006 and 2010 exploring the idea of retreat.

Using the pseudonym Lester B. Morrison, he created Broken Manual over four years (2006–2010) an underground instruction manual for those looking to escape their lives.

Soth investigates the places in which people retreat to escape civilization, he photographs monks, survivalists, hermits and runaways.

In 2010, Soth flew to the United Kingdom but despite not having applied for a work visa was allowed into the country on the understanding that if he was "caught taking photographs" he could be put in prison for two years.

So he handed the camera to his young daughter who took pictures in Brighton.

In 2010, Soth founded the publishing house, Little Brown Mushroom (LBM).

Through it, he publishes his own, and that of other like-minded people, "narrative photography books that function in a similar way to children's books," in book, magazine and newspaper formats.

A 2016 photo exhibition, titled Hypnagogia, featured 30 images from Soth's 20-year exploration of the state between wakefulness and sleep.

"Described as a neurological phenomenon, one recurrently associated with creativity, a hypnagogic state is the dreamlike experience while awake that conjures vivid, sometimes realistic imagery," Soth explained in the artist statement for the project.

Following a 2016 assignment on a laughter yoga workshop in India for The New York Times Magazine, Soth stopped working for a year.

During an art residency in San Francisco in 2017, later returned to his practice when the choreographer Anna Halprin, who was 97 at the time, invited him to photograph her at her home.