Photography is a Language
Alec Soth - Photography is a Language - Photo exhibition in Vienna
Alec Soth / Two towels. Canada, 2004. © Alec Soth | Magnum Photos
The American Magnum photographer Alec Soth (born 1969 in Minneapolis) rose to international fame with subtle, nuanced photo series portraying American life. Alec Soth´s work is rooted in the American tradition of “on-the-road photography” and references to Walker Evans, Robert Frank and Stephen Shore. His road trips take him to rural and suburban areas of the USA, where he documents people and situations he encounters, creating portraits filled with poetry and melancholy. Soth´s photography covers middle class life outside the big metropolises as well as people on the margins of society.
In June 2020, I went to his first solo exhibition in Austria at the KUNST HAUS WIEN where his best-knows series were displayed: Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), Niagara (2006), Broken Manual (2010), Songbook (2014), and I know how furiously your heart is beating (2019).
Next to the prints on the walls, the exhibition paths flanks showcases that contain numerous materials including photographic books, annotation, letters, typescripts, documents, newspapers clipping and special digital lecterns, on which to scroll the works that do not have had space in the rooms.
I discovered Alec Soth´s work a few years ago and was always fascinated by the calmness that emanate from his reportage photos. Niagara (2006) while retaining the documentary aspect, is an epic collection of photos and letters that tell of broken loves, ardent desires, romantic metaphors and squalor. The falls are a destination for cheap weddings and honeymoons, lots illusions, suicides. Romanticism struggles to make its way through sheets of cheap paper written by uncertain handwriting, squalid motel rooms, honest faces of expectant brides. Soth probes the beauty of everyday life, and, like a hound, perceives the smell of the real world.
Soth´s photographic approach is characterized by a philanthropic curiosity and guided by his acute attention to the extraordinary in the commonplace. He also creates remarkably powerful portraits of people and places, many imbued with dreamlike or puzzling qualities, which is often reinforced by the inward gaze of the individuals he portrays or the way light suffuses the landscape. Alec Soth speaks of photography as a language that has many dialects. His photographs therefore convey collective ideas of living situation or (amorous) relationships that have been shaped by North American movies, literature and music. We the viewers not only read the cultural codes that manifest in clothes, poses, gestures, or glances, in interiors and landscapes, but also link them with our own knowledge and personal feelings. Thus, the photographs evolve into new stories with individual dialects.
“Photography has the potential to make things visible that deep down we know or suspect. Much like texts, photographs want to be read and to lift up into the world the poetic expression they contain.” (Jiré Gözen)
