Alec Soth

In this beautifully produced third issue of the international art/fashion collectible Fashion Magazine, the acclaimed American photographer Alec Soth plays Editor-in-Chief, Advertising Director and sole photographic contributor--to quietly mesmerizing results. Featuring exquisite printing, unexpected gatefolds, special inks, varnishes and paper changes, this magazine-as-artist's-book-as-sociological-study-as-tongue-in-cheek-(yet-also-very-real)-advertising-vehicle contains some of the most riveting work being produced by a young photographer today. Soth explains: "While Fashion Magazine has a single photographer-author, it's still a magazine, not a book. So it doesn't follow my usual mode of slow, solitary production. It's collaboration. The ideas for the collaboration were formulated very quickly. I was approached by the folks at the Paris office of Magnum to work on this issue late last year. I immediately said yes. I was a huge fan of the previous two editions (by Martin Parr and Bruce Gilden) and was looking for an excuse to play with fashion . I often say that when I am making a portrait, I'm not 'capturing' the other person. If the photograph documents anything, it is the space between the subject and myself. Something similar is at work with Fashion Magazine. I'm not really comfortable saying I know anything about Paris or its fashion world. And I suspect that most fashionable Parisians know just as little about Minnesota. What is interesting is the space between us. My favorite example of this involves Chanel. In Paris, I photographed Karl Lagerfeld at the Grand Palais. In Minnesota, I photographed a girl with a Chanel shopping bag in front of Sally's Beauty Shop. With this magazine, I'm trying to explore the distance between those two places."
Photographer Alec Soth was born in 1969 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he continues to live and work. He is the recipient of major fellowships from the McKnight and Jerome Foundations, and was awarded the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography. His photographs are represented in major public collections including The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions worldwide. Soth's widely acclaimed first monograph, Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published in 2004, followed by Niagara and Dog Days Bogotá in 2006 and 2007 respectively. Soth is represented by Gagosian Gallery in New York and Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis. He is an associate photographer with Magnum Photos.… (lisätietoja)

Alec Soth’s reputation as one of the leading lights of contemporary photographic practice is largely predicated on the books he has published. This unusual catalogue accompanies a touring exhibition which uses the four major bodies of work which Soth has published as books since 2004 as the structural basis for both a mid-career retrospective and an investigation of Soth’s prescient understanding of the various and distinct applications of photography as a tool for storytelling across diverse media. The title of the exhibition comes from Walt Whitman’s poem Song of Myself [1855] and references both the pages of his books gathered for consideration and the notion that his work is also a story about Soth himself.

Soth's meteoric rise to international acclaim began with his first book, Sleeping by the Mississippi, published by Steidl in 2004. The book has sold through numerous print runs and has long been out-of-print. It embodies not only a moment in which a new and original voice emerged with an unusual ability to transpose subtle and highly personal stories of local American life, but also marked a significant early event in the photo-book publishing boom we are currently experiencing. The success of his two subsequent volumes, Niagara [2006] and Broken Manual [2010], combined with the hugely influential exploration of self-publishing under his Little Brown Mushroom imprint, have all reinforced Soth’s position as a master of the book form. The recent success of Songbook [2015] has seen a return to the mainstream of book publishing.

This catalogue is a special object, bringing together an essay by Aaron Schuman spread across 29 large format postcards, with mini facsimile versions of Soth’s 4 books, all housed together in a luxurious printed and embossed clamshell box.

Box:
Embossed cardboard box with 4c printed paper cover and interior printed 1c. [228 mm x 223 mm]… (lisätietoja)

Alec Soth‘s photobook "Looking for Love, 1996“, including his photo series of the same name, looks back to the time of the beginning, the time when everything is still open and exciting, when everything gently falls into place. It‘s the phase of the beginning, that forms the basis not only of a new love, but also of each new photographic project. It‘s a book about searching, about the curious and intuitive approach to people and their stories. About falling in love to a medium that opens insights to worlds that would otherwise stay hidden – intensive and haunting like an interminable night at the bar… (lisätietoja)

“This is the closest we have to an Americans for our time... CAPOLAVORO!... already hailed critically as a classic... One of the best photo books in a lonnnnng time”

Known for his haunting portraits of solitary Americans in Sleeping by the Mississippi and Broken Manual, Alec Soth has recently turned his lens toward community life in the country. To aid in his search, Soth assumed the increasingly obsolescent role of community newspaper reporter. From 2012-2014, Soth traveled state by state while working on his self-published newspaper, The LBM Dispatch, as well as on assignment for the New York Times and others. From upstate New York to Silicon Valley, Soth attended hundreds of meetings, dances, festivals and communal gatherings in search of human interaction in an era of virtual social networks. With Songbook, Soth has stripped these pictures of their news context in order to highlight the longing for connection at their root. Fragmentary, funny and sad, Songbook is a lyrical depiction of the tension between American individualism and the desire to be united.

Alec Soth (b. 1969) is a photographer born and based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His photographs have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 2004 Whitney and Sao Paulo Biennials. In 2008, a survey exhibition of Soth’s work was exhibited at Jeu de Paume in Paris and Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. In 2010, the Walker Art Center produced a traveling survey exhibition of Soth’s work entitled From Here To There. Soth has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2013). In 2008, Soth founded his own publishing company, Little Brown Mushroom. Soth is represented by Sean Kelly in New York, Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis, Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, and is a member of Magnum Photos.… (lisätietoja)