To See and Be Seen
Photographer Alec Soth on the intimate art of exposing lives
By Lizzi Ginsberg
Alec Soth walks across the stage at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and starts slapping images on a document projector, a updated version of the sort used in high school when he was there, some 30 years ago. He’s not a fan of PowerPoint. “I’m like a DJ, I can just move in different directions up here,” he says, and rotates through the various books and prints on a table beside him.
Soth grew up in Minneapolis and remains based here. He is perhaps best known for his portraits of Midwestern life. He’s had more than 50 solo exhibitions and published more than 25 books, most recently I Know How Furiously Your Heart is Beating, which is largely focused on sharing intimate space with strangers. He’s also become known for his editorial work, for the New York Times and other publications, and his own publishing projects through his Little Brown Mushroom imprint.
But long before all this, Soth began his career as a darkroom technician at Mia. And now, back in the museum, he’s having a homecoming of sorts, lecturing to a packed auditorium on “the space between us.” True to his Midwestern roots, “[he’s] undoubtedly shriveling from receiving so much attention,” says Mia’s curator of Photography and New Media, Casey Riley, by way of introduction. (Admittedly shy in his youth, Soth says he dreaded the thought of presenting in the auditorium during staff meetings.)
In some ways, Soth’s presentation mirrors his photography. He says when he took his first photography class at the University of Minnesota, he spent a lot of time wandering. He began by photographing road trips, eventually leading to his first book project, Sleeping by the Mississippi. Like sleeping or dreaming, “I was trying not to force the connection between pictures.”
During this trip, Soth took what might be his best-known photo: Charles, Vasa, Minnesota, in which a bearded man wearing coveralls holds two model planes against the backdrop of a rural Minnesotan winter. “A huge part of looking at this photograph is imagining his story,” says Soth.
Likewise, Soth explains that a huge part of making photographs is deciding how much of the story to tell. In his book Niagara, featuring the lovebirds and other phenomena of Niagara Falls, he experiments with this question, including short annotations alongside some of his photographs. Scrawled beside the portrait of a young woman, one reads: “When I’m photographing people I often ask them to tell me their dream. Chantelle told me that her dream was to have a baby with Paul Stanley (from KISS).” Soth notes that by contrast, when working on editorial commissions, often the story is already there. “I like that, but I also like the struggle of the story,” he says.
In recent years, Soth has diverted some of his attention from making photographs to collecting them. He’s mostly interested in found photos — boxes of amateur snapshots. “Part of collecting these photographs is dealing with the lack of story,” says Soth, but another part of it is appreciating photography as primarily an amateur activity. “There is such a thing as becoming too professional,” he says.
Tossing some of these found photos in front of the document projector, Soth ascribes them names: “High-school kid, classic dad, super ’80s, self-portrait.” Some have descriptions on the back, others not at all. “That’s what photography is,” says Soth, “Wondering what the story is and being drawn into it.”
He lingers on a set of selfies, all taken by the same woman in different outfits. She’s in her bathroom, posing in front of the mirror. In Soth’s most recent photo project, I Know How Furiously Your Heart is Beating, he explores similarly intimate environments, photographing people in interior spaces, hoping to grab a glimpse of their interior lives. Says Soth: “Part of photography is to see something, but so much of it is to be seen.
