Sleeping by Alec Soth

I missed Alec Soth's rise into the photographic stratosphere in the latter half of the 2000s through 2010s, as I was busy with my day job and a new family and was disconnected from things photography. Discovering his work a few years ago I was curious how he came to be anointed and inducted into the pantheon of heavy hitters.

It seems that Soth is no oracle. He has not ploughed new conceptual ground or pioneered new techniques. His color images of heartland American scenes fit comfortably into the classic American straight / descriptive documentary photographic tradition. Like Diane Arbus, he gets our attention with his eye for cataloguing visually interesting marginalized oddballs. And his large printed photographs confidently occupy contemporary blue chip gallery and museum space with their claim of artistic importance, if for no other reason than because of their imposing physicality.

Like many success stories, Soth's seems to have been a case of being in the right place at the right time. Having a photobook or two published by Steidl early in his career, and before the boom in photobook publishing, for example, along with being positioned to take advantage of the Internet and more recently YouTube, plus Soth's work coinciding with the contemporary phenomenon of large format digital color prints.

I would love to be able to see Soth's Little Brown Mushroom books to get a better understanding of his work using the book format. But everything is sold out, and it doesn't look like he is reprinting them.

As for his other published books, I finally got a copy of Sleeping by the Mississippi this year at Paris Photo. Thematically it holds together as a body of work, with connections established at different levels by the idea of the Mississippi and themes related to beds, sleeping, and religion, and these folded into an assembled cast of memorable down-home American characters. A Mississippi of the mind, or at least of Soth's mind. Well-crafted, but not a game changer in terms of current practice.

Nothing breeds success like success, however, and now that Soth has achieved a certain status it is assumed that any work he produces is important. He is thus able to publish to much hoopla a book like Advice for Young Artists, which despite its name is not a good place for young artists to find career advice. And the book does not hold together thematically like Mississippi. There are young artists in the book, views of props and places in art schools, and some perfunctory advice, but nothing compelling to hold it together.

Advice would have been largely incomprehensible had it not been for the YouTube video Soth made wherein he explains it. Apparently the book for him was an opportunity to have fun and be self-indulgent. In the video you nod when he points out his intentions for this or that photograph, but you would be clueless to figure it out on your own. One wonders if such a book would even get a second look from publishers if it didn't come with Soth's name recognition and sales potential. Like with Robert Frank's The Lines of My Hand, you are left with the impression that he is thumbing his nose at you by being willfully incoherent. It's as if he is tired of making an effort to make sense and perform for his audience and just wants to mess around.

If only Soth had dealt with what would really interest a young artist: not how to find your own vision and path, which is something you have to do alone, but more practically how to translate your talent and drive into recognition and financial reward, at least enough to leave the ghetto most artists inhabit. It would be interesting for instance to know the specifics of who he cultivated as gatekeepers and what persuaded them to open the doors. This inside story of the how of his success would be fascinating, but one still imagines that it probably would be a collection of unique circumstances, timing, and luck and not something that could be duplicated.

It is useful to consider Alec Soth's market success and status as its own thing, separate and distinct from his artistic accomplishments, but as a practical matter for him and everyone else the two are assumed to be the same. Unfortunately so, since everywhere you look you see photographers with high levels of artistic success but low levels of the other kind.