Alec Soth’s American Landscapes and Global Interiors

Alec Soth is a contemporary American photographer who specializes in capturing his native US. Based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, he traveled across all states to meet and photograph Americans and their surroundings. In his recent project, Soth’s perspective has expanded on a global scale to encompass people’s homes and lives.

Grand Narratives

Sleeping by the Mississippi—this is how Soth calls his project, which involved travel across his native country of America. In the early 2000s, he traveled along the country’s longest river, the Mississippi, documenting people living by the river’s banks. Then, he published a book dedicated to the town of Niagara, while in Songbook from 2015, he took to the streets to photograph American social life in every state. According to the New York Times critic Hilarie M. Sheets, he did extremely well at “finding chemistry with strangers,” particularly “loners and dreamers”.

Then, a Sabbatical from Work and Life

In 2016, Soth felt something that changed his life from day to day. He traveled to Helsinki, and after a flight, still jet-lagged, he sat by the lake. And then, he experienced something that he himself described as “a full-on mystical experience”, which brought him to a realization that everything in the world is connected. He made a radical shift in his life and, for a year, lived in a farmhouse near his own home in Minneapolis, meditating and pursuing a private kind of art making, rarely photographing.

I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating

After a year, he felt ready to return to work with new energy and a new approach to photography. He would arrange portrait sessions with strangers in their homes, using natural light. Usually, his sitters were alone, but sometimes he’d even photograph just their empty houses. The title for this 2019 project was taken from Wallace Stevens’s poem The Gray Room, which, as Soth has said, reflects “the beauty and mystery that can happen in a brief encounter in an interior space”, that he has tried to capture with his photographs.

Although you sit in a room that is gray,
Except for the silver
Of the straw-paper,
And pick
At your pale white gown;
Or lift one of the green beads
Of your necklace,
To let it fall;
Or gaze at your green fan
Printed with the red branches of a red willow;
Or, with one finger,
Move the leaf in the bowl–
The leaf that has fallen from the branches of the forsythia
Beside you…
What is all this?
I know how furiously your heart is beating.