Best photo books by American documentarian Alec Soth

Best photo books by American documentarian Alec Soth
This is the USA — In Huck 53 we explore how a photographer like Alec Soth gets to where he is, on Magnum’s roster and gallery walls, with an audience that celebrates his every whim and fancy. Here are his most iconic books.

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.

Large_H1000xW950

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.

alecsoth92834

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.”

USA. 2008. The Unabomber's View.

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.
o-ALEC-SOTH-SONGBOOK-900

 

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
Photography

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
Photography

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
Photography

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?
Culture

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
Photography

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
Photography

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

Sign up to our newsletter

Issue 81: The more than a game issue

Buy it now