Best photo books by American documentarian Alec Soth
- Text by Andrea Kurland
- Photography by Alec Soth
Alec Soth has his first major UK exhibition, Gathered Leaves, at the Science Museum, London, until March 28, 2016. Here are a selection of game-changing books by a man who roams the backwaters of America.
Sleeping By the Mississippi
For this project, inspired by Huckleberry Finn, Soth explored hidden pockets of the Midwest – from pentecostal churches and Angola State prison to the boyhood home of Johnny Cash – leaving himself open to unplanned encounters.
Niagra
Driving up to Niagara Falls, Alec’s “second album” unravelled a place famous for suicide and new love. “There’s this intensity of emotion that swirls around the Falls,” he says. Shooting cheap motels, newly-weds and honeymooner nudes, and inspired by Marilyn Monroe’s Niagara, Alec tried to access the dark contradictions of hope and heartache.
Broken Manual
Ducking below the radar for Broken Manual, Soth went into the wild in search of hermits, survivalists and monastic outsiders. “I was making a manual for men who want to run away from life,” he says, flipping through stark images that marked a conceptual departure, intertwined with diagrams that make no sense. “The idea of the manual is that it’s broken – it doesn’t work.” Behold a treescape that looks ordinary and mundane; it’s the view that Theodore John Kaczynski, the ‘Unabomber’, would have taken in while making his homemade bombs. “I became more interested in that – the idea of the picture, rather than the picture itself.”
Songbook
A scrapbook of stories that explore community in the age of virtual interactions. Texan cheerleaders, ravers in New York, solemn solitary figures – the images Alec captured spoke of a modern malaise; our desire to be individuals and part of something all at once. “It’s about nostalgia, a longing for the past, as well as an anxiety for the future,” says Alec, who came to see the images as his Great American Songbook, a collection of songs evocative of another time.
Check out the full article in Huck 53 – The Change Issue. Grab a copy in the Huck Shop or subscribe today to make sure you don’t miss another issue.
Latest on Huck
Exploring the impact of colonialism on Australia’s Indigenous communities
New exhibition, ‘Under a Southern Star: Identity and Environment in Australian Photography’ interrogates the use of photography as a tool of objectification and subjugation.
Written by: Miss Rosen
My sister disappeared when we were children. Years later, I retraced her footsteps
After a car crash that saw Magnum photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa hospitalised, his sister ran away from their home in South Africa. His new photobook, I Carry Her Photo With Me, documents his journey in search of her.
Written by: Lindokuhle Sobekwa
Inside New York City’s hedonistic 2000s skateboarding scene
New photobook, ‘Epicly Later’d’ is a lucid survey of the early naughties New York skate scene and its party culture.
Written by: Isaac Muk
Did we create a generation of prudes?
Has the crushing of ‘teen’ entertainment and our failure to represent the full breadth of adolescent experience produced generation Zzz? Emma Garland investigates.
Written by: Emma Garland
How to shoot the world’s most gruelling race
Photographer R. Perry Flowers documented the 2023 edition of the Winter Death Race and talked through the experience in Huck 81.
Written by: Josh Jones
An epic portrait of 20th Century America
‘Al Satterwhite: A Retrospective’ brings together scenes from this storied chapter of American life, when long form reportage was the hallmark of legacy media.
Written by: Miss Rosen